Christmas 2013

This Christmas, as with past Christmases, we return to the scene in Bethlehem.  Again we see a young couple being turned away.  There’s no room for them.  Again we see the common, everyday scene: a stable, a feeding trough, animals, working shepherds.  We hear Mary’s cries as she gives birth and we hear a baby’s cries, now one of us.  The scene itself is unremarkable and unadorned.  It’s a simple scene.  But the gospels will tell us through the message of angels that here God’s wonderful presence is to be found: “Glory to God in the highest” – that here our peace and our good will for one another are to be found: “Peace on earth and good will.”


This Christmas I am struck in particular by the simplicity of the scene.  The star of Bethlehem shining on these events is highlighting for me their simplicity.  People – a young family – doing what needs doing – to meet the challenges life is giving them.  And we are told their unadorned, unremarkable lives are quite enough to be where God’s presence and our peace-filled presence to one another are to be found.

There’s another scene I have been reflecting on.  It takes place in Rome – at the Vatican.  The scene is Pope Francis accepting as a gift a twenty year old Renault as his pope-mobile of choice.  And I begin to hear the same heavenly music announcing that something very right and good is being done here.  There’s a sense he’s doing what should be done.  Somehow – moving from papal Mercedes to papal Renault – moving from papal palace to papal hostel – somehow it all echoes to me that God and our peace are to be found in the unremarkable and unadorned life – are to be found in the simply human.  Washing another person’s feet is not just a ceremony; it’s a way of finding God and bringing peace to one another.

Bethlehem and Rome – both point us toward choosing simplicity of life for ourselves.  They are saying simplicity of life is our vocation as Catholic Christians.  It is this simplicity that will allow us to ask basic questions.  Questions like: Where does our happiness lie?  Does it lie in friendships, family and people?  Or, does it lie in the cycle of making and spending more money?  What does our experience tell us?  Our simplicity of life will prompt us to ask: What’s an economy for?  Do economies exist just to perpetuate themselves? Or, do they exist for the purpose of human flourishing?  Are the first and last questions we ask of an economy whether it is improving people’s lives – or, what are its scorecard numbers in GDP and stock market?

For Christians simplicity of life is a real ethic for how to live – how to live in such a way that we find God present in life and we bring peace and good will to one another.  Our aspirational ideal is not to have more for ourselves but to be more for others.  After all, that’s what the simple scene in Bethlehem tells us about God, Jesus and ourselves.  The babe in the manger is Jesus – and is us.  Just as God breathes into Jesus his own love – just so does He breathe into us.  What God breathes into us is his mercy – his tender, loving mercy.

Our Christmas lesson – from Bethlehem and Rome – is that we are to live full of mercy.  Live mercy to the full!  For us all else in our lives – all else – is to become mere footnote to that life lived in tender, loving mercy for others.

Fr. Pat Earl, S.J.

The Way We Are

3^rd sunday of advent

PASTOR’S ADDRESS TO THE PARISH 

Last year my talk at all the masses was called “The Sermon on the Amount”.  It was about money – because we needed to talk about money.  Money’s a reality in life.

But this year we need to address something deeper – not what we have but who we are.  As your pastor, I think we need to talk about who we are and how we are – as a community.  The title of this talk could be “The Way We Are”.

As I review the last four and a half years I have been with you as pastor, what is striking is our growth as a parish.  This is nothing new to you – but just to review to gain some perspective.  In 2009 we were 800 households.  Now we’re about 1,600 households with a total of 3,500+ registered members.  And our growth has made us younger.  Our average age is 34; our median age is 36.  Here are some other important statistics.  We’re just over 51% married.  A significant and growing demographic group is our singles.  We’re over 35% single.  My group – the 60+ gang – we make up about 11% of the parish.  That’s about 400 people.  In context, that’s 400 compared to 760+ school age children and 1,200+ young adults.

So, on this statistical, demographic level “The Way We Are” is lots of growth and lots of change.  But I want to move beyond the statistics.  I want to move deeper – to raise the question of our parish as a community.

This is an obvious question for us to ask as Catholics.  Catholicism is a kind of “we”-thing.  To be Catholic is to be rooted in community, to be committed to common good, to a just society and to the nurture and care of God’s creation for future generations.  As Catholics we’re a “we”-people.

But that same question of community is a difficult, much un-answered question for us as Americans.  We are unsure what it means to belong: what it means to belong to one another; what it means to belong with one another.  That sense of community and the commitment it requires not only eludes us; it challenges and scares us – because we, as Americans, prize and privilege the individual and individual freedom.  As Americans we’re an “I”-people.

Just to make it clear.  I am not talking here primarily about the kind of belonging that comes from group membership – like a club membership or even citizenship with its rights and obligations.  I am talking about the belonging that comes with friendship, with marriage, with family – and with the community that’s akin to all these: the community of Church and parish.

As a parish we are recognizably Catholic in our social justice outreach into the larger community.  And we are recognizably American in our struggle to create and commit to being a community among ourselves.

In that context I want to bring up just one statistic as an example.  There are 763 registered school age children in the parish.  20% are in Catholic school.  30% are in our faith formation programs.  But how about the remaining 380 students?  As Catholics, we say they’re part of us.  They belong.  And we all belong together with one another.  But as Americans, do we let them go their own individual way, untouched by us?  Do we let them – and I mean this in the deepest sense – do we let them be “alone” – be “alone” – prepping them for a whole society of loners, not knowing how to step out of themselves?  Do we want that for them?

How do we belong to one another?  How do we belong with one another?  What kind of community are we willing to create and commit to?  These are basic and difficult questions for us as a parish.  And we can see their difficulty in our on-going inability to grow a base of committed volunteers: volunteers to serve in our faith formation programs – to serve as ministers at our liturgies – to take an active interest in parish affairs at meetings and assemblies – and volunteers to visit and care for our elderly – a growing number.

Sadly, in our Church and in this parish, we are learning from the larger culture to behave as consumers – consumers of services we expect to be given to us.  We are behaving as “getters” – not “givers”.  By definition the consumer is basically intent on having his own needs met.  The needs of others are just not a motivating force for the consumer.  Adding value to someone else’s life is not a serious question.

When we mimic our society – its culture and values – then we are giving ourselves its future.  That is a future we can see in our country today.  Just look and listen!  You will see and hear a distrust among us.  It’s a pervasive, sometimes ugly distrust that disengages us from one another and makes us dysfunctional – incapable of common purpose.  And all this – all this in the name of an exaggerated and unquestioned individualism we call “freedom”.

As your pastor and as a Jesuit, I must tell you that course – our present course as a parish – is unsustainable.  It has no future.  Though we have much for which we can be truly grateful as a parish, we have no promising future as a community.

The only thing that can give us a promising future is, quite simply, love – our love for one another.  It’s a love that’s active and tangible.  It’s a love that commits itself to actually living and working and doing for the sake of others.  It’s a love that shows up.

This is Jesus’ command to us: we are to love others as we have learned to love one another.  This parish is to be where we learn to value and practice love – where we learn why and how to give to others: to give ourselves and to give of ourselves.  This learned love is what we will bring to our city, world and planet.

The only thing that can give us a promising future is our decision to hear Jesus’ command to us.  It will be our decision to get serious about being his disciples – our decision to learn to live and love like Jesus – our decision to be more than churchgoers.

We all have big decisions to make: you and I, laity and clergy, married and single, young and old.  “The Way We Are” is a matter for our decision as a community.  We have the responsibility for “The Way We Are” as a parish community.  This decision and our responsibility will not go away.  In the coming year, together with the Parish Council, I will recall us to both.  Please get ready for that.  And let us make the needed decisions – aware of their consequences and aware of God’s Spirit within and among us.  We need to pray – pray to God and pray for one another.

I want to close with some words from Pope Francis, from his recent letter of encouragement to the whole Church titled “The Joy of the Gospel”.

Let us believe the Gospel when it tells us that the kingdom of God is already present in this world and is growing,… The kingdom is here, … it struggles to flourish anew.  Christ’s resurrection everywhere calls forth seeds of that new world; even if they are cut back, they grow again, for the resurrection is already secretly woven into the fabric of (our) history, for Jesus did not rise in vain.  May we never remain on the sidelines of this march of living hope![278]

You need to know this.  Being your pastor has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.  It’s out of a grateful love for you that I raise the questions I have today.  St. Peter’s, our parish, deserves to be a parish where disciples are made.

 

 

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

What’s Supposed to Happen in Advent?

2^nd sunday of advent
 
Is 11, 1-10 / Ro 15, 4-9 / Mt 3, 1-12

What I have to say is really very simple.  I think it goes to the heart of what Advent is all about.  I want to recall our opening prayer.  There we prayed that no earthly concern hold us back from being companions of Jesus.  We are praying that God remove things that get in the way of our receiving Christ and becoming his companion.  We have prayed for the grace of repentance – the grace of conversion.

Repent means changing the direction in which we look for happiness.  It means honestly recognizing that our projects for our own happiness have not worked – and cannot possibly work.

So Advent brings us to a simple question:  what needs to be removed from our lives so we can have the joy of actually recognizing Christ’s presence – the joy of recognizing that Christ is our companion?  That’s what Advent is all about.  This whole season is all about helping us become aware of Christ’s presence in us.

I think we have some un-learning to do.  The Advent scenario is not that Christ will come to us at Christmas – as if he were not already with us.  Rather, it’s that during Advent we learn to come to Christ.  We learn to recognize how Christ is already present to us in deeply real ways.  Advent brings us to the Risen Christ – who is the only Christ we have.

So what is getting in our way?  What needs removing?  Each of us must answer for ourselves.  And Advent is the time to do that asking and probing.

I want to share what gets in my way.  It’s when – with some self-satisfaction that I call gratitude – I begin to think myself and call myself a disciple of Jesus.  And I do that because I believe certain things about Jesus.  After all, being a disciple means being a true believer:  believing Jesus is my savior and redeemer; believing he is truly divine and truly risen.  And I believe in the Church [that’s spelt with a capital C!] he founded: one, true, catholic and apostolic.

 
But then comes the honest question:  so what?  So what?  How does all this believing actually affect my life?  In other words, what is the depth of my believing?  If I say Jesus is my savior and redeemer, truly divine and now risen and alive, at work in the world – then would it not make sense for me to really rely on what he says about how and where I will find joy in life?  How about when he says: Joyful are the poor – the meek – the merciful.  Joyful are those who hunger and work for justice in the world – who suffer persecution for the sake of that justice.  Joyful are the ones who work to bring about peace.  Do these sayings coming from my divine, risen savior and redeemer – do they make any real, down-to-earth sense to me?  Do I even test them, try them out to see if they’re really true?  Do I actually follow Jesus enough to know the joy he speaks about?  I haven’t noticed myself suffering persecution for the sake of justice – and feeling the joy.

What gets in my way is my own phony discipleship.  And that’s an excellent Advent question to ask myself:  what is the depth of my discipleship?  It might be a question we all need to ask.  We are parishioners – but are we disciples?

Let us all repent – and feel a new joy in our lives – a new joy to the world!

 Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

What Will Our Future Look Like?

33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mal 3, 19-20 / 2Thess 3, 7-12 / Lk 21, 5-19

 

In today’s gospel reading from Luke Jesus is foreseeing the future of his disciples.  And he sees scenes of fierce opposition to them.  He says this opposition must and will happen.  Yet he also tells us we are not to be afraid – not even worry how we are to defend ourselves.  Rather, Jesus tells us, we are to entrust ourselves over to God’s presence.  And we will know what to say and how to act in the midst of opposition.

As his disciples we really should take Jesus’ foresight as something to rely on.  We should agree with him:  there’s something about following him that provokes strong opposition.  And we might ask ourselves: does our discipleship bring about strong negative reaction?  We might ask further:  what is it that we do as disciples – or, at least, should do as disciples – that could possibly get the kind of reaction Jesus describes here?  He is describing strong reactions from the politically powerful – from the rich and well off – and from established religious leaders too.

There’s a scene in Luke’s gospel that I think can help us answer those questions.  It’s the scene where Jesus tells his disciples they must forgive those who wrong them.  He says:  if they wrong you seven times in one day and return to you seven times saying, “I am sorry,” you should forgive them.  The disciples are stunned by Jesus’ teaching.  It so contradicts not only the way things are but also the way they think things should be.  So they ask Jesus to increase their faith.  They think having a bigger faith, a faith able to overcome all doubts and hesitations; they think that will enable them to forgive as Jesus wants.  But Jesus contradicts them.  It’s not a matter of big faith.  Size isn’t the issue here.  He tells them if their faith were small, the size of a tiny mustard seed, they could do great things – fantastic things.

To become forgiving we must entrust ourselves – not to the bigness of our own faith – but to becoming little and weak, even in the eyes of those we forgive.  It’s a matter of learning – humble learning:  learning not to let the intended snubs, the little cruelties we practice on each other – not to let these get in the way of our root connection to each other.  Doing this, we will grow to do greater things.  We will grow – we will flourish into not letting bigger hurts get in the way of our root connection to each other.

For Jesus our becoming forgiving suits us.  And this is where all the opposition will begin to stir, because for Jesus we have been made for mercy.  We are hardwired for it.  We have been made to receive God’s mercy and to give it further.  Our life project is mercy.  It is not the accumulation of things, nor their consumption.  It is not our having but our letting go in love that connects us to each other – that connects us to all and everyone.  That is God’s movement of mercy in our lives.  To rely on God is to rely on that movement of loving mercy within us.  Letting go is letting God act.

To the powerful intent on holding on to their having – we, disciples of Jesus, we say: we will rely on mercy.  We will rely on the weakness and messiness of mercy.  As citizens, we will not seal ourselves off from one another.  We will not prefer partisan purity to our shared human root connection.  As Church, we will not seek to become the club of the strong, holy and righteous.  Rather, we will seek to be love among all – to be patient love, full of mercy and goodness, among all, for all.

As that Church we gather for Eucharist.  We gather to let Jesus’ words take on new flesh in our lives.  With him, through him and in him we say to our world:  This is my body – for you.  This is my life-blood – poured out for you.  All this – all this for the forgiveness of sin.

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

A November Homily

31^st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Wis 11, 22-12, 2 / 2Thess 1, 11-2, 2 / Lk 19, 1-10

In the liturgical calendar the month of November begins with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls.  And the last Sunday in November is the feast of Christ the King.  It marks the end of the Church’s liturgical year.  So this month – as also this time of year – would have us reflect on basic things.  Always around this time of year I feel the need as a Jesuit to reflect on something very basic and final: the martyrdom of six brother Jesuits in El Salvador.  November 16 will mark the twenty-fourth anniversary of their deaths.  I want to remember them with you.  And I want to offer their example as a model for how to live and how to die as disciples of the Christ we name this month as King of the Universe.

We need to remember what happened.  We remember that November day in 1989 when elite troops of the Salvadoran army arrived on the campus of the Jesuit university in San Salvador.  These troops, especially their officers, had been trained here in the United States.  They headed directly to the Jesuit residence.  Summarily six Jesuits were shot through the brain – a graphic army protest to the kind of thinking these Jesuits had pursued.  They had spoken out publicly on behalf of the poor and had demanded social justice for all Salvadorans.  After killing the Jesuits, for good measure the soldiers also killed their cook together with her daughter.

There was a member of the Jesuit community who was not killed.  Jon Sobrino, a theologian, had been away in Thailand giving talks.  I know Jon.  We were students together in Germany.  When he returned to El Salvador, he reflected on the slaughter and martyrdom of his brother Jesuits.  “Why?”, he asked, “why kill these men?”  Jon’s answer was so simple and clear-eyed.  They were killed because they had taken to heart Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.  Like the Good Samaritan, these university professors and parish priests had practiced works of mercy and compassion – and for that they were killed.  Like the Good Samaritan, they had seen the obvious needs of the people around them.  They had not avoided nor closed their eyes to what was blatantly wrong there in front of them in the lives and struggles of their Salvadoran brothers and sisters.  And they responded.  Their response was to call into question the basic power structures of society.  They thought basic thoughts and did basic things:  like speaking out publicly – like calling the powerful into question – like calling the powerful to account.  They responded in those ways because love always confronts un-love.  It threatens our hate and confuses our indifference. 

A year later, at the first anniversary, Jon Sobrino prayed publicly at the graves of the martyrs.  He prayed: “Rest in peace, my six Jesuit brothers.  May your peace give us hope, and may your memory never let us rest in peace.”  I remember their martyrdom today so that we may grow in hope but also that we may have unsettling memories.  I don’t mean the unsettling memories that come from guilt.  They will take us nowhere.  I do mean learning to recognize in these Jesuits what love can do when lived to the end.  What will unsettle us is the recognition of what we can become – the recognition of what God can actually make of us.  It is our hope that will unsettle us.

There is no hope for a love that rigidly focuses on its own advantage.  Let us dare to hope – dare to love – and dare to live for others and, if called upon, to die for others.  Let Christ really be our king!

 

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

Traveling toward Gratitude

28^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2Kgs 5, 14-17 / 2Tim 2, 8-13 / Lk 17, 11-19

Today’s gospel about the lepers is about gratitude.  And gratitude always involves a recognition of some goodness.  We are thankful for something we see as good.  Of the ten lepers who were healed, only one moves on to gratitude.  And Jesus tells us what enabled him to make that move was his faith.  “Your faith has saved you,” he says.  Only this leper was saved – meaning only he experienced God’s saving presence in the healing.  And this man, we are told, was a Samaritan.  To Jews he was a religious heretic – not one of God’s chosen people.  And he is the one who has faith, Jesus tells us.  He is the one who recognizes God’s presence in his life.

I’d like to reflect with you on faith – on a faith that allows us to travel to gratitude.  I think we really need to make that move to gratitude.  Though words like “thank you” come quickly to our lips – we are polite – I do think we have real difficulty with having a faith that opens us up to a basic attitude of gratitude toward life.  The poet Wendell Berry speaks of our having lost the sense for life’s daily evidence of goodness and beauty.  That evidence has become smeared and blurred by what he calls our “dispraise of life”.  Dispraise of life.  We are missing life’s wonder, its daily wonder.

I don’t think it’s any great mystery how and why we dispraise life.  We rarely take the time to look at it – to really look at what is before us.  And even less do we take the time and the care to really look at what is within us.  Our busy embrace of life’s surface distracts us from life’s core.  And our worry about how we look to the eyes of others keeps us from having honest, true vision for looking more deeply into ourselves and into life.

Time – taking time is the issue.  Taking time to look – to be with life as it is – as it unfolds around us.  Taking time to be with our own life – our own life as it deeply, truly is.  Taking time to move beyond all the clichés that pass for life-goals and signs of success in life.

We need a faith that allows us to travel toward gratitude.  Jesuits travel daily toward gratitude by an act of faith we call the “Examen”.  The Examen is a simple way of praying.  It is counter-cultural because it does require that we actually take the time to quietly be with our lives.  Each day we review the day with this question in mind: What do I have to be grateful for?  What good have I done?  What good has been done to me?  How have I loved?  How have I been loved?  In the light of that question, just let the day unfold before you.  And that’s it.  That’s the Examen.

If you stick with it, I assure you, you will find your life qualitatively changed.  And the key word there is “find”.  I am talking about coming to experience your own lived life as uncovering, as revealing a deeper beauty and goodness.  If we but look, our lives will yield up their deep-down goodness and beauty.  And there God will announce himself:  I AM.  God will announce his saving presence to us in our own beauty and goodness.

Let us make the move from dispraise to praise of life.  Let us take the time to travel toward gratitude and witness the wonder of our own lives.  Then we will know – and know for sure – it is deeply true when we say to one another: “The Lord be with you.”

 

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

The Stuff of Our Lives

26^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Amos 6, 1a, 4-7 / 1 Tim 6, 11-16 / Lk 16, 19-31

The parable Jesus tells us is a study in contrasts.  There’s the rich man who dresses in purple and fine linen.  His whole life yells “I live in luxury and I want you to know it.”  He plans his pleasures and parties carefully.  But notice this:  in the parable he has no name.  He’s nameless.  Living for his own pleasure makes him a nobody.  There’s no substance to him – no deeper identity.  And then there’s Lazarus – a beggar.  He’s a man without the luxuries of life – without all the things and stuff of the rich man.  The dogs licking his sores is not a sentimental touch.  Being licked by a dog rendered you religiously impure.  He couldn’t join with others to pray in the synagogue.  But he has a name; he’s got substance to him.  The name “Lazarus” is Greek for the Hebrew name “Eliezer” which means God is my help.

How do these two relate to one another?  Clearly they don’t – at all.  There’s a clear chasm between the two.  But notice this:  the rich man is not portrayed as an exploiter of Lazarus.  He doesn’t harm him.  Nor is he seen as an un-religious man.  He could very well be an observant Jew regularly found at synagogue services.  How the parable does portray him is simply this:  he enjoyed his riches and ignored the poor man.  Lazarus was stretched out at his door – in front of his eyes, but he did not see him.  Lazarus was really there, but the rich man excluded him from his life.  The rich man chose to be indifferent.  He chose to keep company with his pleasures and parties – to keep company with his things and stuff.  He chose to exclude Lazarus and Lazarus’ suffering from his real concern.  And in the parable we see graphically how God reacts to this chosen behavior.

It is tempting to understand this parable in a partisan, political way.  Jesus is for the poor and against the rich.  To be a real disciple of Jesus you shouldn’t be rich.  Being poor makes you more pleasing to God.  Really good Christians stay at second-class hotels.  If they stay at the Ritz, they get tarnished.   But all that misses the point being made in the parable; and it misunderstands the tragedy being acted out in it.

For Jesus there is a clear connection between being his disciple and the way we own and use possessions.  What the parable wants to do is to get us thinking about what is my real, lived relationship to the things I have and possess.  The way we regard owning things and the value we attach to possessions have everything to do with the way we think about ourselves and about other people in our lives.  Do I value myself in terms of what I have?  Is my success given in what I have?  And then, do I like things more than people?  Do I rely on them more than people?  Is stuff more important, more attractive to me than people?

We can think about how we would answer those questions – how we would like to think of ourselves answering them.  But for Jesus our real answer is given in how we actually respond to human need and suffering.  If we choose to live at a distance from the suffering of others – choose to live blind to their needs, then we have already given our answers.

But notice this.  The parable does present us with a tragedy – a human tragedy.  And the end of the parable shows us how Jesus understands this tragedy.  He thinks our tears should be kept for the rich man.  He is the tragic figure.  He had the opportunity to live a fully human life, and he chose to live the little life – the meager life of stuff and things.  He made a tragedy of his life.  He made himself a nobody.

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ