On Law

 There are all kinds of laws. There’s a law that limited your speed to 35 MPH on Mechanic Street and 55 on 190. Another that says you should go to Church on Sunday and a third that requires that our fire alarms ring at the fire house in case there’s a problem in the attic.

Sacred laws, of the sort loved by the Pharisees, regulated all the jots and tittle of everyday life, like when to wash cups and hands and kettles and beds. And so we hear Jesus take on the Pharisees who emphasize, above all else, obedience to the law. Above all else.

I was a bit of a Pharisee when I was in middle school. Good people, I reasoned, obeyed the law….all laws in all circumstances, and there were no excuses. I still find remnants of such a view in my life. I was going to the dentist last week and came to a crosswalk where the light said DON’T WALK. As far as the eye could see, and my eyes could see quite a distance in each direction, there were no cars coming. But I still waited for the WALK sign, because it was the law.

Now I’m not usually so pharisaical in my approach to the law, but every once in a while I do find myself letting the inflexible fifth grade boy come out to play, painting the world as black and white, with really distinct borders. 

But most of the time I let go of  such a childish view of the world, realizing, with some nuance, that law is not an end in itself, but a means to promoting and protecting what really matters.

For example, the speed limit on Mechanic Street is designed to keep me from having an accident and doing great damage to your car, or running off the road and up the stairs and down the main aisle of this church in my green Subaru. The value is the protection of human life and property and the maintenance of good order where we can all go about living our lives in peace.

But let’s say that your wife is in active labor and you and she and the soon to be born baby are still 2 miles from Leominster Hospital and you push the accelerator a bit beyond 35 in order to get there before the baby. I’ve never met the policeman who would write you a ticket for doing 42 in order to get to the hospital on time.

Or what about the law that says you should go to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation?  Remember in the first days of COVID when we couldn’t have more than ten people in Church? Certainly it was not a sin to quarantine at home. Or what about the 91 year old lady I visited yesterday who needs someone to go out to do her grocery shopping. Did she commit a sin by not taking an ambulance to Church this morning?

The law which obliges us to celebrate Mass on Sundays is designed to fulfill the Lord’s command to “Do this in memory of me” and to “keep Holy the Lord’s Day.” And I know no Pope or priest who would blame you for not doing the impossible!

Or what about last week, during that extraordinary storm, when the downspouts were overwhelmed with water in the course of just a few minutes. You should have seen it. The water backed up into the attic and came running down that column. It was like a waterfall in the middle of Church and it created a mini-Lake Cecilia on that side of the Church.

But as the water cascaded to the floor it hit a heat sensor, which triggered the fire alarms and flashed the lights and blared the sirens both here and in the fire station, followed by the arrival of three fire trucks and the nicest fireman any town has ever blessed with.

That law worked, because it was designed to make sure we would not burn down, but no fireman suggested he would take us to court. Rather they disconnected the alarm until we could stabilize the flood and dry out the sensor and then Mr. Poirier’s crew reconnected it the next day. A few fifth graders may have been distressed that we had turned off the alarms for a day, but, as the fireman understood, the whole point of the law is to preserve a value which lies beneath it. Which is just what we did.

And that’s what Jesus is pointing out to the Pharisees. They are more concerned with the observance of the jots and tittles of the law, than promoting the larger issues that lie beneath.

Sure, your pots are nice and clean and your hands are washed, Jesus says, but what about your envy, blasphemy and arrogance. Maybe you should spend a bit more time worrying about the evil desires in your own heart than you trying to indict your neighbor on the commission of a misdemeanor.

For, as the Code of Canon Law, the book of laws which governs the life of the Church, says so beautifully, “Salus animarum suprema lex esto.” — “The salvation of souls is the supreme law.” It’s all about faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.

Showing Mercy

 At the end of Mass today we will pray an ancient prayer, which asks the Lord to: “Complete within us…the healing work of your mercy, and graciously perfect and sustain us, so that in all things we may please you.”

“Complete within us healing work of God’s mercy.”

Notice the prayer does not ask God to forgive us, but to complete the healing work of his mercy in us.  A mercy which will never be complete until it envelops our heart, saturates our souls and makes us love others with the same merciful love with which Jesus loved us from wood of the Cross.

For that’s what makes us pleasing to God, that we might forgive others and he forgives us.

But that’s so hard!

Think, for a moment, about the person who is the hardest to forgive in your life. (pause) the one who can make you so angry you want to spit. Who did that thing…with maliciousness and evil they hurt you in that way, and they knew what they were doing!  But they did it anyway!

How could you forgive someone like that?  It seems impossible.  And it is for us. What is it they say “to err is human, to forgive divine.” Maybe that’s why we need the prayers of the angels and saints and Our Lady Untier of Knots.  Did you ever hear of that devotion? It’s an eighteenth century German devotion inspired by the words of Saint Irenaeus: "Eve, by her disobedience, tied the knot of disgrace for the human race; whereas Mary, by her obedience, undid it.”

And what a knot we tie when we refuse to forgive someone. And only God can untie them…But we can help when we do five things: Look, Respect, Listen, Love and only then Forgive.

Five things.

And the first is to seek out my enemy: face to face.

Not Facebook to Facebook, but real fleshy human face to real fleshy human face.  Where he can see the tears and the fears in your eyes. It’s like Jesus said: “When your brother^* sins [against you], go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.”

First look, then Respect.

Oh, I know, way down deep you want to defeat or humiliate your opponent, but you gain nothing but more enmity from that.  Rather we must seek to restore friendship by an expression of unconditional love and a recognition of that which is most lovable, the most admirable in our opponent. Or, as John Paul II wrote:

“Even an enemy ceases to be an enemy for the person who is obliged to love him, to do good to him and to respond to his immediate needs promptly and with no expectation of repayment. The height of this love is to pray for one's enemy. By doing so we achieve harmony with the providential love of God: ‘But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.’”

Third, Listen. Let go of the hurt and listen in love.

Listening is one of the most loving things I can do for another person.  Just recall how many times the Lord Jesus asks a question, expecting a response: “How long has this been happening to him?” “Do you want to be made well?” “What did Moses command you?” 

Or remember Jesus with Samaritan the woman at the well.  He begins with a question, “Will you give me something to drink?” and then comes the opening up of the deepest pains of her life.

Maybe that’s where the old saying comes from: “Friends are those rare people who ask how we are, and then wait to hear the answer.” 

So you begin the healing by listening….not listening for what you to hear, but listening for what they want to say.  Listening with your heart.

And only then, after looking and respecting and listening, so we Speak. Speak with love.

Listen to the advice Saint Paul sent to Timothy:

“Avoid foolish and ignorant debates, for you know that they breed quarrels.  [Rather] be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness. It may be that God will grant them repentance that leads to knowledge of the truth, and that they may return to their senses out of the devil’s snare, where they are entrapped by him, for his will.”

It may be they were repent, but even if they don’t, you still speak with gentleness.  Speak the truth, but with kindness. So, listen and then speak. And then repeat. And then repeat…as many times as needed.

Not as many times as needed to hear what you want to hear from them, but as many times as needed to heal the wounds of this interpersonal conflict, so you can get on with the work of loving this brother who had been lost to you.

For only then will we be ready to Forgive. 

Forgive like Pope Saint John Paul II did after he was shot by Ali Acga in 1981.

It was two years after Agca has shot him that the Pope went to visit him in his prison cell.  He looked him in the eye and shook his hand. Agca kissed the Pope’s hand and the two talked quietly for 21 minutes. John Paul said of the meeting: ‘What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me, I spoke to him as a brother whom I had forgiven, and who had my complete trust.”

After the meeting, the two shook hands and the Pope gave Agca a rosary.  The Pope would later write:

 ‘Real peace is not just a matter of structures and mechanisms. It rests above all on…capacity to forgive from the heart. We all need to be forgiven by others, so we must all be ready to forgive. Asking and granting forgiveness is something profoundly worthy of every one of us.”

And he’s absolutely right.

On the Cross and the Death of Edith Stein

Today we celebrate the feast of a most unusual saint. And yet, despite her fascinating life and heroic death, she is as contemporary as she is unusual.

She died on this day in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, a professed Carmelite nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was gassed there with a group of Jews, because she too was born a Jew. 

She was born Edith Stein, the youngest of 11 children. Her father died when she was two and her strong-willed mother was left alone. As Edith grew it was clear she had a superior intellect, which she demonstrated in the study of philosophy and her work for women’s suffrage. It was her work in philosophy which planted the Catholic seed in her mind to study Catholicism, writing a doctorate under Husserl on "The Problem of Empathy.” But it was the sight of an old woman praying in the Frankfurt Cathedral which planted Christ in her heart.

 

"This was something totally new to me,” she later wrote. “In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot.”

But then it was the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila that brought her fully to the Faith. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth.”

And so she was baptized and eventually entered a Carmelite convent and became one of the greatest spiritual writers the church has ever known. But now her scholarship and indeed her whole life had a different purpose: "If anyone comes to me,” she wrote in 1933, [all I want to do] is to lead them to Him."

To know Christ, she later wrote, is to know his Cross. "I understood the cross as the destiny of God's people…” she wrote, as she was beginning to sense the impending danger to all Jews and former Jews under the Third Reich. In 1939 she wrote to a friend: "Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me. I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death ... so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world."

So, Edith was arrested by the Gestapo, along with many other Jewish converts in retaliation against a letter of protest written by the Dutch Roman Catholic Bishops against Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews. Edith wrote at the time, "I never knew that people could be like this, neither did I know that my brothers and sisters would have to suffer like this. ... I pray for them every hour. [But] God will certainly hear our prayers in distress."

God did hear the prayers of this Carmelite "daughter of Israel," as Pope John Paul II called her at her canonization. He heard her prayers to live and die close to the Cross of Jesus, after which she had been named. Years earlier, writing on the teaching of the great mystic Saint John of the Cross, she wrote this:

"One can only gain a knowledge of the cross if one has thoroughly experienced the cross. I have been convinced of this from the first moment onwards and have said with all my heart: Ave, Crux, Spes unica (I welcome you, O Cross, our only hope)."

When you and I hear the name Aushwitz, we think only of hopeless suffering, cruelty and death. But in the suffering Saint Teresa Benedicta endured is found the Cross, our only hope. For it is only when we are joined to the Cross of Christ that life makes any sense at all. 

As Saint Francis tells us in his famous, it is only in for it is in giving that we receive, in denying ourselves that we find ourselves, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are raised to eternal life.

Give us this Bread Always...

It was the most scandalous thing Jesus ever said. In fact, Saint John tells us, that once many of the disciples heard what Jesus said, they “drew back and no longer went about with him” (Jn 6:66). They just could not believe it.

Oh, they were all thrilled to death when a day before he had multiplied the loaves and the fish to feed them all, to fill their bellies. It was a really neat trick.

But then he said something they just couldn’t stomach. Six little words that made them all run away. Six little words: I am the bread of life.

You see, bread from heaven they could accept. After all, they all knew the story of the chosen people starving in the desert and how Moses called down the bread from heaven. So this must be the new Moses, they thought, who can do magic tricks with food…all the food we could ever want. Satisfy our every need.

But no. Now, now he he has to spoil it all by saying that he is the bread come down from heaven. And then it gets even weirder: Unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you will have no life in you, but those who eat his body and drink his blood will live in him and he will live in them, and they will never really die.

It was just too much for them. And so they ran away.

And then, as Jesus said to his disciples, he says to you and me.  And you? What about you?  Will you run away too?

Do you believe that the consecrated bread you eat is truly the flesh of the Son of God?

Do you believe that unless you eat this bread you will have no real life in you?

Do you believe that if you eat this bread you will live forever?

Do you believe that if you eat this bread you will never really be hungry, ever again?

Do you?

For if you do, you will reply to the Lord as the faithful remnant did: Lord, give us this bread always.

And if you do, you will place the sufferings and hopes and dreams and pain and sacrifices of your life upon that altar to be joined to his Paschal sacrifice. And if you do, you will come to Communion with the firm belief that you are receiving the bread of angels. 

As Mother Teresa once wrote:

“We cannot separate our lives from the Eucharist; the moment we do, something breaks. People ask, 'Where do the sisters get the joy and the energy to do what they are doing?' It is because they receive Jesus in Holy Communion every morning and pray before him every day. I beg you to get closer to Jesus in the Eucharist…to  pray to Jesus to give you that tenderness of the Eucharist, showering us with the healing, sustaining and transforming rays in the Eucharist.”

When I was a boy, going through all the angst and suffering of every teenager boy, I used to take my bike home from school and stop on the way at Saint Brigid’s Church and gaze at that little red light, which told me Jesus was there, God Almighty knew my name and loved me in all my brokenness and littleness. 

And I still kneel before that little red light today. But now I also understand what Caryll Houselander, the great English mystic once wrote about an old Father O’Grady at Mass:

He lifted the unconsecrated Host, light as a petal on its thin golden paten, and with it lifted the simple bread of humanity, threshed and sifted by poverty and suffering…

He lifted the wine and water mixed in the Chalice, and with it offered the blood and the tears of his people to God. And God accepted the offering, the fragments of love were gathered up into the wholeness of Love and nothing was wasted. 

Slowly, exactly, Father… repeated the words of Consecration, his hands moved in Christ's hands, his voice spoke in Christ's voice, his words were Christ's words, his heart beat in Christ's heart. 

Fr. O'Grady lifted up the consecrated Host in his short, chapped hands, the server rang a little bell, the sailor, the handful of old women and the very old man bowed down whispering "My Lord and my God" and the breath of their adoration was warm on their cold fingers…

The little server rang his silver bell. The people bowed down low. Time stopped. Fr. O'Grady was lifting up God in his large, chapped hands. 

Christ remained on the Cross. The blood and sweat and tears of the world were on His face. he smiled, the smile of infinite peace, the ineffable bliss of consummated love.

“LORD, GIVE US THIS BREAD ALWAYS.”