Of earth and gratitude

Naaman the Aramean bathes in the Jordan River at the behest of Elisha the prophet to cure Naaman's leprosy only after an argument and the pleading of Naaman's retinue. He is insulted by the proposal. There are far greater rivers in Aram. Why should he bother with the small stream known as the Jordan? Still he does. He is cured. And now he recognizes the God of Israel as his own.

Jesus heals ten lepers who appealed to his goodness and ministry. Ten lepers obey him by going their way only to recognize healing within themselves. One leper is so astonished that he returns to Jesus in gratitude. Where are the others, Jesus asks? The one who returned is a foreigner. There is a note of disappointment in Jesus as he realizes that none of his own returned to thank him.

Naaman the Aramean recognized more than just his own physical healing. Naaman recognized that he had encountered the God of Israel. So he asked Elisha the prophet for the privilege of removing two mule loads of earth to take with him back to Aram. He will now worship only the God of Israeli earth.

The leper who returned to Jesus likewise encountered God, this time God as seen in Jesus Christ. He too acknowledged not only that he was cured but that he had also encountered someone more powerful and greater than he. He met Christ and that changed his life.

In the sacrament of penance we focus so much on our sins and sinfulness that we forget the most important aspect of the sacrament. Ridding ourselves of sin is only the first step. Too often we fail to recognize that we meet Christ in the sacrament, in this encounter. Too often we fail to grasp the mercy and consolation that Jesus brings to us when we give over to him our sins. Mostly we are anxious about speaking the words to the confessor lest we become known. Yet Jesus wants to know us, to know our sins, so that he can forget them.

When her confessor refused to believe St. Margaret Mary Alacoque's visions promoting the Sacred Heart, he asked her to have Jesus reveal what he told his own confessor in his last confession as proof of her visions. St. Margaret Mary returned to her confessor and startled him by announcing that Jesus had forgotten his sins thus convincing the confessor that St. Margaret Mary was truthful.

There is a kind of aberration within us. We are anxious about revealing our sinfulness and yet there is a part of us that wants the world to know our sinfulness. We know this from the hundreds of self-revelations we witness on various kinds of television talk shows. We strive to entertain strangers with our defects.

The leper returned to Jesus and was grateful to him. This is the most important part of the story. It is our encounter with Jesus that takes priority and not the verbal laundry list of sins we present to him.

Back to the past with respect

Forty-eight years ago on October 11 the Indianapolis Times ceased publication. It was one of three daily newspapers in the city at that time and its demise marked the beginning of a downturn in newspaper publication here. My father spent 26 years at the paper first as a police reporter and ending it as assistant managing editor. In high school I worked part-time as a copy boy. A brother worked in the composing department for a time.

A third brother joined the two of us today and a couple dozen other folks for the unveiling of an historical marker on the site of the Times building torn down many years ago. There is now a green commons area surrounded by the Hyatt Regency hotel to the east and the Westin hotel to the west. The marker is located near the center of the commons, a bit outside the actual former site, but close nevertheless.

Several former Times employees were present for the ceremony. Dick Mittman was a sports writer. George Totten worked in the composing department. Kathleen Van Nuys reported society news. Donna Mikels Shea reported hard news. Carl Henn worked at the city desk and Gerry Lafollette was also a reporter. Jeff Smulyan, who now heads Emmis Communications, was perhaps the youngest former Times employee present. He was a copy boy in 1963 while in high school.

I was very touched to hear Gerry Lafollette speak of my father as the "Monet of makeup." My dad's principal job on the Times was composing the design of each day's front page. Donna Mikels Shea worked diligently to see that my dad was recognized in the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.

The employees fondly remembered the hard work each of them put in  particularly when such tragedies occurred as the explosion at the Coliseum in 1961 and the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Though none of them was around to be involved in it, the Times is also remembered for the Pulitzer prize it won in 1928 for its two-year coverage of the Ku Klux Klan which dominated the corrupt politics of Indiana during that decade.

The hour or so we spent at the event was sobering. It was good to step back and to recall what preceded our present life. The Times building was not particularly outstanding in appearance and, as I remember it, seemed a bit ancient and in need of an update. Its location at 214 W. Maryland St. was 

then not a particularly pleasant one. It was a bit out of the way in the downtown area. Now it is very much in a high profile neighborhood with the Indiana Convention Center directly across the street. The historical marker sits in the center of the commons and it is hoped that it will survive the vandalism and weathering that a former marker suffered after first being installed on the street sidewalk in 1979.

The former employees are all survivors of a business that doesn't really exist anymore and one that is now difficult to explain. These employees were all professionals who believed it was important to report the events of city, state, nation and world. Their subject was the world in which they lived. Unlike newspaper and broadcasting today, the subject was not themselves. The generosity of their lives and work made reporting the news worthwhile and responsible.

Rewards points gone wild

There must have been three or four of us waiting in the checkout line at Walgreen's this afternoon, waiting for one of two cashiers to open up. One man at the first cashier had questions about a sale price on some cigarettes. A woman with the second cashier had many questions about the reward card points Walgreen's offers. She had accumulated something like 14,000 points and seemed to think the points would double or possibly even triple at some point. Perhaps she thought she would be earning air miles but she wasn't very clear. After a time, however, it became clear that she assumed the reward points automatically increased.

I suppose this expectation follows from all the gimmicks retailers and others offer to gain customers but it seems to be working against them. If children are paid to study, or for taking an exam, when will they begin to demand payment for going to school rather than paying tuition to be schooled. The American psyche seems to expect rewards for doing nothing.

An advertisement for Dish TV features a woman proclaiming that with Dish you get more of everything including more channels. Car commercials have long touted the incredible number of cars available on dealer lots and tried to convince us we should buy from them and not the dealer across the street who has fewer cars. We are used to having just about every kind of food available in grocery stores much to the amazement of foreigners who can be overwhelmed by the variety of food available.  i recall many years ago hearing an Irish woman flummoxed when trying to buy some milk only to discover she had to make sense of the differences between whole milk, 2%, 1%, skim, buttermilk, and perhaps other variations.

The disciples plead with Jesus to increase their faith in Luke's Gospel for the 27th Sunday. We want more, they seem to say, while Jesus reminds them how much they could do with only a mustard seed size faith. For an American Christian, that goes against everything we learn as loyal citizens. If faith is any good, it must be splattered all over our Sunday morning worship like a movie with a cast of thousands and a pea brain intelligence. Let us have a faith that does miracles and we will all become believers.

The point of the unprofitable servant is that he expects to be rewarded for what he is expected and obliged to do. How much we seem to marvel when someone does a good turn and asks nothing in return. How is it possible that such human beings exist? The missing virtue is, of course, humility and it is consistently denigrated by the icons of our pop culture as well as the captains of modern industry. The meek don't inherit the earth, they proclaim, they inherit the dirt.

Pope Francis this week said, "Without the Cross, without Jesus and without stripping ourselves of worldliness, we become pastry shop Christians… like nice sweet things but not real Christians.” The Christian cannot enter into the spirit of the world, which leads to vanity, arrogance and pride, he continued. And these lead to idolatry, which is the gravest sin. “Our Lord told us: We cannot serve two masters: either we serve money or we serve God.…We can’t cancel with one hand what we write with another,” he remarked. “The Gospel is the Gospel.”

Our worldliness and demands for rewards are infecting and destroying us.

Unique and original

In our youth we reject the advice and direction of family so that we may be different and stand out from the crowd as unique in the entire universe. Then we quickly fall into a sameness with friends lest we seem unusual to the crowd with which we run. In the eighth grade corduroy was the acceptable fashion for boys of the late 1950s and for some months the corduroy pants and accompanying shirt had to be pink and black. It could be a pink shirt or black shirt and the pants had to be the alternate color. But when the fashion trend began each of us had to have some combination of those colors. Otherwise one was not accepted comfortably among one's classmates.

The 1961 musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying featured a scene in which a secretary sang about the most unusual and original dress she had bought that day for a date with a junior executive only to discover that several other secretaries had made the same purchase. What made her unique had suddenly turned her into a carbon copy.

Luke's Gospel for today commissions 72 disciples as missionaries to the surrounding towns Jesus wants visited. He offers specific instructions and is quite blunt in telling these disciples what to do and what not to do. Most important in his bluntness is the direction that the disciples are to shake the dust from their feet if the Gospel preached in a certain place is rejected. And Jesus states that there is a serious price to pay for such rejection. It will be easier for the sinners in Sodom than for those who reject Jesus.

We too are sent as missionaries to our nearest neighbors. Pope Francis has made that emphatic in many of his homilies. Many of us want to let well enough alone and not disturb the peace among those who do not believe as we do. We want to fit in and not be seen as different. We don't want to stand out in our beliefs lest we be politically incorrect or offensive. Our goals and objectives in life aren't much different from everyone else's.

But Jesus calls us to be missionaries of his Gospel. If we can water down that Gospel, we gladly follow and perhaps even preach. It is more difficult to speak of living a virtuous life or loving one's neighbor or bringing peace to the world or living unselfishly or seeking justice than it is to indulge our senses and passions for our own personal pleasures. It is also easier to issue broad condemnations of one another. The Gospel still calls, however, and Christians are called to preach it. Moreover, we are called to live it. 

Meaning and language

The Theatre of the Absurd produced a host of plays in the mid-twentieth century that seemed to underscore the decline of meaningful communication in Western society. Among others, Eugene Ionesco created dialogue for The Bald Soprano based on phrases, idioms and small talk he learned while studying English. Edward Albee began The Zoo Story with a man sitting on a park bench being confronted by another man insisting "I've been to the zoo!" Some analyzed Western culture in general and the English language in particular as losing any sense of meaning and the only meaningful thing to be the meaninglessness of both language and culture.

Language is always changing. Purists would like to believe there are unchangeable rules that apply to language but a simple study of grammar reveals this fallacy especially in the changing meaning of words. One example of this is the common usage of the word "awesome". This word dates to the 17th century and originally meant "profoundly reverential."  Since the early 1960s the word has tended toward the meaning "impressive." It does not take much insight to see the difference. Some things that are impressive are not necessarily reverential.

The Apostles, early on in their ministry, argue among themselves who is the greatest.  Jesus takes the steam out of their discussion by pointing out the qualities of a child. Whoever is least in the kingdom is the greatest, somewhat like an innocent and naive child who knows no more than to openly offer himself or herself without qualification. The word "greatest" has no meaning in the eyes of Jesus, that is, no more meaning than doing God's will innocently and willingly.

Do my words to the Lord have meaning or am I just reading lines? Am I profoundly reverential before the Lord or just impressive? Who is greater? Me for trying to communicate with God? Or God who communicates with me?

Good news is bad news

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Gospel of Luke 16: 1-13

The good news today is bad news.

For about five seasons I was a faithful follower of “Mad Men.” Though the scripts were well-written, it took only a single episode for me to realize that there was not a single redeeming character in the story. No one ever learned from their mistakes and each character kept making the same mistake over and over. But sin is fascinating to watch. Each week each character sank deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of moral indifference. And so, after five seasons I just lost interest. In the end I became bored by characters whose concerns were all totally self-centered.

Today’s Gospel features two unredeemed characters. The rich man master is not admirable. He thrives in a system of injustice that preys on poor people. He is a businessman in a world in which the custom is to exact 100% interest on the cost of goods he sells. This system was quite common in Jesus’ time.

The steward is not admirable. We are told in the beginning that he squanders the rich man’s property. The steward, however, is clever. He knows that as a result of having been caught he will lose his job and have to fend for himself. So he goes to his master’s debtors and rewrites their debts effectively slashing the 100% interest from what they owe the master. Of course, this further harms the master because he makes no profit. He will receive the return of the debt owed to him but he will make no profit.

The master applauds the steward’s cleverness. He commends him for his prudence. But the English word prudence does not express the meaning of the word well. The Greek word is phronimos, an adverb describing practical action aimed at accomplishing some particular end. The steward knows how to look out for himself.

Is Jesus suggesting we admire the steward? I think not. The children of this world, he says, are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. In Luke’s Gospel ‘world’ is the world of evil. ‘Light’ is that world begun by Jesus. Trustworthiness, Jesus says, is the great virtue. The steward is not trustworthy with the dishonest wealth of the master. So who would trust the steward with true wealth?

True wealth is not found in the business dealings of the master. It’s not found in our own worldly business dealings. Neither is it found in our malicious or devious dealings with one another at any level. No. True wealth does not exist in our manipulative business dealings or in our manipulative personal relationships. If we are not trustworthy with the belongings of another – and perhaps ‘belongings’ refers to a person’s integrity, joy, sorrow, talent, etc. – then who will give us what rightly belongs to us?

Jesus then gets very direct. We can’t serve both God and mammon, that is, we can’t serve both God and money or material wealth. Christians cannot serve false wealth.

In a way, you could say that Luke sticks it to us today. In the Gospel for the feast of St. Matthew, Jesus chides the Pharisees when he selects Matthew as one of his followers by saying, “Go and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

The master in today’s Gospel is a righteous man by virtue of his wealth. The steward is a sinner. But unlike Matthew, the sinner who responded to the call of Jesus, neither the master nor the steward are capable of recognizing their sinfulness. Each is righteous by virtue of his own self-interest.

Pope Francis has reiterated over and over during the short term of his papacy the importance of mercy, and the importance of being concerned with the needs of others.

So today’s Gospel is bad news for us if we think we are superior to anyone else because we have the money, or because we have the privileged position, or the good looks, or because we are holier, or smarter, or a better athlete or whatever. In the beautiful interview Pope Francis gave this past week, he was asked who he is. I am a sinner, was his reply. As he reflected further he completed the response, “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.”

Are you and I masters, stewards, or sinners?

 

 

Hand or mouth?

Distributing the Eucharist nowadays is not a simple matter. In the U.S at least one can choose to receive the host in the hand or on the tongue. Growing up we were never allowed to receive the Eucharist except on the tongue. It was only a couple of years after I was ordained that reception in the hand became an option and it quickly became the norm. For those of us who received our first communions in the late 40s and earlier or until the early 70s, it was a relief to receive in the hand.

Our training for our first communion in 1948 included numerous fear tactics. The hosts we used at that time were fairly tiny wafers of considerable softness. We were instructed, under pains of some terrible disaster that could befall us, not to chew the host and God help you if you touched it. I remember getting the host stuck on the roof of my mouth - more than once - and waiting to be struck dead when I finally had to loosen it with a finger after it became a curled up ball still stuck on the roof of my mouth. The penalty for touching the host under any circumstance was truly frightening, but we never learned what the penalty was. At times I thought it to be a mortal sin and I think one passionate and merciless sister or other taught us that. 

During my first year in the seminary, a priest on the staff who offered our Mass regularly was notorious for picking up a host with his thumb and index finger and then putting it into our mouths in such a way as to slide his thumb on our tongues. Thus, each successive communicant was greeted with a saliva-filled thumb facing oneself holding up an already wet host.

I have told our seminarians about him when I ask them to please - if you are going to receive communion on the tongue - make sure your tongue is extended sufficiently so that the priest does not have to pry open your lips to get the host in your mouth.

For many of us in the early 70s it was a relief to be able to receive communion in the hand. For one thing it seemed to us much more like a gift being received and accepted than like the action of a parent trying to put baby food into an infant's mouth. That being said it remains an option and many do indeed choose to receive on the tongue. I don't personally find that acceptable when I am on the receiving end but that doesn't happen often as I am usually the celebrant.

A religious woman I know once argued with me when she became aware that many of our seminarians choose to receive on the tongue. "You can't let them do that," she screamed. "Don't let them do that." Well, they can do that and I do let them do that if they choose to. I do not know the piety for making such a choice but it is indeed an option to receive in the hand. It is not mandatory.

What is interesting to me is how we make dogma of things that change more quickly than a flash of lightning. How one receives the host is of less importance than that one does indeed receive it. In the hand or on the tongue - Jesus is a gift in many different styles.