Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Love of God and love of neighbor. The two greatest commandments, Jesus claims. I’m not always certain we believe that they are. My experience suggests that we often try to emphasize one over the other. And it is not uncommon for some adherents of love of God to beat adherents of love of neighbor over the head - and vice-versa. Often we are more interested in scoring points than in practicing either one - love of God or love of neighbor.

And yet Jesus is clear. They go together. In the 1950s Frank Sinatra recorded a song with the verses “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like the horse and carriage. This I tell you, brother; you can’t have one without the other.” So it is with love of God and love of neighbor. We can't have one without the other.

Today’s Old Testament reading warns the Israelites not to oppress the strangers who live among them, nor to extort the poor among them. All too often we are guided by fear of the unknown. So today some fear the immigrant who comes to us from a foreign land. And these days anyone coming to us from West Africa is regarded not just with fear but with angry fear. With each proscription in today’s first reading, God reminds the Israelites that he will hear those who cry out to him, even to destroying those who fail to care for those most in need.

Paul exhorts the Christians in Thessalonica who turn from idols to the living God. Perhaps we need to exhort our fellow citizens to turn from the idols of prejudice and fear and anger to await the Son of God in heaven who delivers us from the coming wrath.

Then there are the Pharisees in the Gospel. They are not unlike us in this respect - we often look for the magic bullet that will have the answer to everything - the total cure, the diet that works - the app that makes everything possible. The Pharisees want to know what the greatest commandment is. What is the one thing I must do that will make trying to please God easy? So that I don’t have to do all these other little things. Tell me what I must do to get to God so that I don’t have to worry about all 10 commandments, or all the laws on the books, or whatever rules I must obey. Simplify my life.

The question asked by the Pharisees is another way in which they try to trap Jesus. They didn’t care about helping strangers or the poor except for the very narrow proscriptions in their own law. They didn’t really care about his answer. They had their own ideas of loving God and loving neighbor and they wouldn’t have listened to Jesus even if they agreed with him.

So their question is asked so that they can justify themselves. We do similar things do we not? In following God’s law, am I not often more interested in being right rather than wrong and less interested in the practice of love itself.

All of this only makes sense in the larger context of the whole Gospel. Eventually, Jesus will die and return to His father. The disciples will find themselves hiding in an upper room fearing for their own safety. It is only because the Holy Spirit fills them that they leave that room and begin to preach and witness the life of Jesus. We can be like these disciples. It is tempting to remain in the upper room in fear. But we cannot stay there. Our faith must be lived. God and neighbor both must be loved. We do this by our practice of faith - by prayer and charity.

Jesus gives us his body and blood to eat each time we come to the Eucharistic celebration that we may be nourished and strengthened to love God and neighbor. It is tempting to remain always before the tabernacle or in Eucharistic adoration and think we are fulfilling God’s commands to us. We are often convinced of our unworthiness and we fall back on the notion that it may be better just to sit and look at Jesus. We imagine that we are better off gazing on God from afar. Yet Jesus never stops inviting us to come to him. We are called to receive and to act in love by saying yes to God’s invitation and then witnessing by our example to one another that Christ is indeed Lord.

New wineskins

Some years ago a young man I knew who was a home school student told me his mother had used the Baltimore catechism to teach him religion. He said he learned all about sin and the devil but he never knew God loved him. I nearly jumped out of my chair at that revelation and wanted to strangle the young man's parents.

There is a Gospel story in Matthew in which Jesus dines at the house of a Pharisee when a woman comes in with oils, bathes the feet of Jesus and then dries them with her hair. She is praised by Jesus for her great love. She does what Jesus' host did not do. She washed and dried his feet. There was no etiquette in Jewish law requiring such a thing. The host did no wrong. But Jesus makes the point that the woman went farther than what was required. This is the stuff of following Jesus. This is what makes a Christian - doing more than what was required.

The woman showed great love and so she receives a great reward. Her great love canceled out her sins. Jesus acknowledges this and we ought to learn this too and stop judging and condemning one another, even our own children.

In an address to priests learning about the sacrament of penance in 2008, Pope Benedict said, "When one insists solely on the accusation of sins, which must nevertheless exist and it is necessary to help the faithful understand its importance, one risks relegating to the background what is central, that is, the personal encounter with God, the Father of goodness and mercy. It is not sin which is at the heart of the sacramental celebration, but rather God's mercy, which is infinitely greater than any guilt of ours."

It is worthy to note that this is from Pope Benedict not Pope Francis. It is also noteworthy that Pope Francis frequently refers to Popes Benedict XVI, John Paul II, and Paul VI when making a point. It has probably been said before but in a different way. The gift of Pope Francis is his tone. He does not say new things but he does repeat the old things in a new way.

Strange connections

Today is the 13th anniversary of my profession of final vows as a Jesuit. It is also the feast of the Birth of Mary and the 10th anniversary of the founding of the college seminary where I serve as director of spiritual formation.

Thirteen years ago I was assigned to the headquarters of the Jesuit Conference in Washington, D.C. I spent five years there as director of communications for the 10 Jesuit provinces. In 2001 I was approved to receive final vows and I made plans to do so in my Jesuit community there. Although I announced the event to family and friends, I expected to go through a simple ceremony within my local community. The president of the Jesuit Conference had been my provincial just a few years prior to this and I asked him to receive the vows. 

My family and friends were not to be deterred, however. What I expected to be a simple event with myself and my fellow Jesuits turned out to be a social event of large proportions. All my brothers with their wives came into town. So did an aunt and uncle and three cousins and their spouses. In addition, some friends from home in Indiana also traveled to the east coast as did the family of a fellow Jesuit from Ohio. The ceremony occurred on a Saturday afternoon. The entire weekend was a festive family reunion. The ceremony took place in the Holy Trinity Parish chapel in Georgetown, a much smaller edifice than the parish church itself but historical because it was the parish's original building.

The one thing everyone remembered were the shadows of the airplanes flying down the Potomac river toward landing paths at Washington National Airport. Because the Potomac sat just below the university campus, the planes followed a path down the curving river just before landing. The chapel has a large window at its rear and the shadows of planes passed by regularly.

Exactly three days later terrorists struck targets in New York and Washington and the festivity of that weekend was gone. The World Trade Center was no more and the Pentagon was badly damaged.  One of my brothers and his wife had stayed on in D.C. for a few days to do some sightseeing. They were able to leave Washington at their own leisure as they had driven in for the event. But a couple I knew well had flown in. They too remained to do some sightseeing and were due to fly out that September 11. They had even checked out of their hotel and were on their way to National. When it became evident there were no flights leaving, they returned to D.C. and tried to check back into their hotel to no avail. It took some doing but they found another hotel where they stayed an extra couple of days before finding a flight that took them through Charlotte getting back to Indianapolis.

Washington was all chaos and it continued for a month. I recall not sleeping well those nights. At that time no one knew what might happen but there was wide speculation as to what could happen. We all began to realize that if we had to evacuate the city, the only way to do so was to start walking the direction opposite central Washington. Later that week I took a walk down to the Mall and walked into a mostly deserted National Gallery of Art to view the section of American art. I remember buying a hot dog from a vendor on the street and the woman selling the food just shook her head when I asked how business was those days.

It is difficult to get very "spiritual" or think pious thoughts recalling my final profession. The weekend seems years away and the vows strike me as unimportant in the face of the disaster of that week. Only the reminder that one is obliged to keep living faithfully to God keeps the vow profession important in my mind and life. Evil can make us forget who we are and can frighten us into forgetting that God remains in control of what a Preston Sturges character once described as a 'cock-eyed caravan.' Only love destroys the hate and there sometimes does not seem to be much of that going around.

Whither religious life?

In recent years I have been on a number of teams at retreat houses directing individual persons on silent retreats of eight days. The number of retreats on which I've worked is not huge but I have guided my fair share of persons seeking closer relationships with God. Many, if not the majority of these individuals, are women religious. I am more and more puzzled by this work.

The women religious have begun to all sound very similar. The more elderly sisters speak completely sincerely and faithfully about their relationship with God. They have developed disciplines of prayer and reflection through years of struggle with the many changes of religious life. They are resilient women and want to be active in their religious lives as long as they can. In other words, they want to remain faithful to the lives of prayer they have nurtured and to be of service to whomever they can. They still see themselves as women on mission. Sometimes this service may be directed only toward others like themselves who are growing older and advancing in physical helplessness. These women still see and know God.

But there are also many religious women who come to retreat from another direction. These women seem to have given up on religious life altogether. Many of them have created an environment of religious life that suits their needs. They do not intend to make any adjustments or adaptations for anyone or for any perceived ideal of religious life. They are close to spitefulness if one even hints of assuming degrees of authority or proclaim obedience a virtue. They have carried renewal to a point of engagement within professional lives emphasizing the identity and power of women within their own ranks. Often they appear to have uncritically adopted ideas and positions that disregard thinking with the Church. There is often negative reaction to patriarchies real or imagined.

The most worrisome issue for me is the impression I get from some women religious that their orders are dying out and yet they have no problem with this. It is an historical fact that religious orders come and go. But some of these women seem unwilling and uninterested in reinventing themselves as members of the Church. The desire seems to be redefining theselves according to their identities as women and not their identities as women in Christ. Thus, some live a sort of religious life that is really something quite different.

One newly professed woman religious came from a highly responsible and highly well paid position in business and she has returned to that position now that she is professed. What does that have to do with religious life? How is she centered in community life? I thought of Philippa Talbot in Rumer Godden's novel "In This House of Brede." Philippa gave up a successful business career to become a contemplative nun. At the end of the novel she becomes novice mistress to the crop of Japanese novices in the order's mission to that country. Thoroughly grounded in contemplative life, Philippa uses her leadership skills from the business world and offers her service to younger members of her community. Her mission is to renew the best of religious life in a new generation of women religious.

Another woman religious I knew was bothered most by a decision she made to move out of the apartment she shared with another woman religious and move back into the larger motherhouse. She was tortured by the lack of freedom she expected there. She worried about the view she would have from any particular room she might be assigned. Are these the prescient issues in community life? Scores of religious women I know either live alone or in groups of two or perhaps three. What is this witness? Whether the religious be female or male, which comes first - religious life or the professional occupation?

Religious life often seems a life of professionalism and a kind of witness of women proving they can work in the larger world much as men. But where is the religious life here? What is mission? Who are they serving? There was and still is somewhat a period in which many religious women were forced from their convents in order to find good paying jobs in order to support their convents. What has that done to religious life? 

I grew up in an elementary school, high school, and even a college education led by religious women. I recently visited my high school journalism teacher, a 101 year-old very alert, very brilliant woman who still maintains her religious life faithfully. There are many, many women religious still struggling to redefine their lives for this century. But I have also met women religious, aging ones, who tell me they cannot have Eucharistic adoration in their motherhouses because middle-aged sisters will not allow it. What is that all about? Or that they will not allow priests to concelebrate in their chapels. A contemporary antipathy toward men is understandable given historic actions and attitudes on the part of many in the hierarchy. Perhaps religious life has to die somewhat. But what will replace it? Can an authentic witness of religious life ever grow out of a sense of individualistic pursuit of one's own interests?

Dreams, assumptions, illusions

Hold on to your dreams! Hold on to your ideals! Beginning a new life, a new project, means bringing fresh thinking to something we've admired from afar. It means considering your goal in a new light, acquiring a different way of thinking. In the seminary, new men arrive with assumptions about seminary and the priesthood which quickly grow confusing and uncertain. It doesn't take long to become disillusioned about the life of a seminarian. If you think we all walk around with our hands folded in prayer, it comes as a surprise to realize that we are more likely to be working our electronic devices.

So we begin to wonder if this is the place for us. I can never emphasize enough that the reason we stay is never the reason we arrive. You will be challenged about your ideals all through your college life. Sometimes, perhaps often, you will have to find better reasons for continuing your formation than those for which you came.

Calvin tells Hobbes in the comic strip, "I go to school but I never learn what I want to know." Some ideals you will adjust as you gain knowledge and experience. Some ideals you will abandon because they no longer apply. Some ideals will grow stronger. The key is our openness to God's will. Are we ready to look at our new lives from God's perspective or from ours alone? We constantly have to question who is in charge - do we only see things our way or do we see them God's way?

Today's Gospel (Matthew 16: 13 - 20, Peter's profession of faith) is so familiar that we can be tempted to idealize it and not look more deeply. As a younger Catholic, I was sure this Scripture passage proved beyond doubt that Peter was the first pope but my Protestant friends weren't convinced and I didn't have enough knowledge to explain it. This reading does nothing of the sort, of course. It does show us that Jesus appointed Peter for the most important leadership role among the Apostles. But being a pope wasn't a question that came into being until after Jesus died. Many bishops in the first years of Christianity had the title 'Pope' but it wasn't until nearly the fifth century with Pope St. Leo the Great that the title was exclusive to the bishop of Rome.

What the Gospel does here reminds us that it is really more important that we focus on Jesus' question. Who do you and I say that He is? Our concern should not be Peter but Jesus. Are our minds and hearts open to hearing God's will here. Apparently Peter's mind and heart were. It is less important that Peter is the chosen one, that Peter is called the first pope, than that Jesus chose Peter to play a special role among the Apostles. Peter is the one who recognizes the hand of God here and thus Peter receives recognition none of the others do. Peter was open to hearing God's word as it was and not as Peter thought it was. It is Jesus who calls.

But the emphasis here is not on Peter. Peter is only as important as his recognition of Christ as the Messiah. Christ is the one who has come to save Israel. Christ is the Son of God. We may want to use this Scripture to beat our non-believing friends over the head but be careful. They may come back and tell you to read this Scripture in context. The passage that follows here in Matthew's Gospel is the one in which Jesus begins speaking to his disciples about his death and resurrection. In that reading the chosen Peter tells Jesus that he would never allow that to happen to him. Jesus calls him Satan.

A feast of a pope

There are two things the feast of Pope St. Pius X - which we celebrate today - brings to mind from my Catholic past. One is the late 19th and early 20th fight against the heresy of Modernism which very few contemporary Catholics remember. The other is the significant liturgical changes which that pope made and which most Catholics today take for granted.

Concerning the so-called Modernist heresy that means little to Catholics in practical terms nowadays, I have one recollection. The year I was ordained I was required to take the Oath against Modernism which the seminary rector was required to administer to those of us about to be ordained. I clearly recall his being somewhat embarrassed after we were called in to his office as a group and advising us just to do it. By 1969 the Oath had become somewhat laughable and seemed to us as well as to him and the faculty a remnant from a less enlightened time. It was no longer taken seriously, a rule that had lost all meaning.

As far as the Eucharist is concerned, what Pope Pius X did was probably farther reaching. Msgr. John Doyle, former head of the philosophy department at Marian University, told me that when he was an eighth grader at Holy Cross grade school in 1910 every student there made their first communion. Before that time Holy Cross and other Catholic school students made their first communion in the eighth grade. Reception of the Eucharist was not permitted on a daily basis. Frequent communion meant monthly or possibly weekly but not daily. The pontiff encouraged more frequent reception as a better understanding of the theology of the sacrament came to be.

The feast of Pope Saint Pius X reminds me once again that Catholic practice changes as time passes by. We can never assume that the way we do things is the way it always was.

On the road without Jack Kerouac

A long summer on the road is coming to a tiring end. It began with a road trip from Indiana to Massachusetts for retreat. Then there was a road trip to Wisconsin for a July 4 holiday with some fellow Jesuits. Lastly, there was an odyssey to Ontario and two weeks' worth of Masses and pastoral work at the Jesuit Martyrs' Shrine.

In between I assisted with a directed retreat in Indianapolis itself.

After a good amount of time on the road, I notice the peculiarities of other drivers. There is nothing peculiar in my own driving, of course. People just need to get out of my way. It does seem clear, however, that most of us are not giving our full attention to one's driving. I suppose this has always been true. Whenever I watch anyone in a movie driving a car with at least one other passenger, I am always amazed the driver can carry on a conversation with the other passenger and look directly at the person riding shotgun for what seems to be an interminable length of time. How do they do it? 

Today the distractions are ubiquitous. Cell phones are the worst, of course, which is why I turn mine off when I drive. But then I have to be more alert the more I become aware of other drivers who seem not to be quite in charge of their own cars as they drive down highways.

One has to scrutinize the attention of other drivers frequently. From the left lane on a freeway a driver lurches over three lanes to an exit ramp just a few yards ahead. A glance proves the driver is talking on a cell phone. How many times I have witnessed a driver moving over at least two lanes and sometimes more in traffic to make a turn or an exit and the driver has not bothered to look to make certain there is no other traffic in the area. Some folks are just lucky to be alive. 

Some folks are in such hurries that they pay no attention to what is around them. A stop light changes and suddenly a pickup truck barrels areound from behind me because my four cylinder engine doesn't have the pickup to go from 0 to 120 in five seconds. The driver of the pickup truck obviously has something important to do, someone to see, or is behind schedule, or just doesn't like anyone in front of him that he bursts forth in his moment of power.

Speed limits are likewise meaningless. While driving in Canada, I found myself constantly trying to translate miles into kilometers (my dashboard is not very bright and I could not see the smaller numbers) but I eventually noticed that those 80 kilometers per mile speed limits usually meant 90 or even 100 to some local drivers. i eventually learned to keep up with traffic unless I were on a two-lane highway and leading the pack.

Billboards. I've learned to ignore them but I had to get a college degree to do so. Driving in Canada was so nice because you notice these things called trees and landscape as you drive along.

On this trip, however, I discovered a curious distraction. I checked my maps to drive south on the freeway numbered 400 and saw that I could short circuit that trip by exiting at a freeway numbered 407 in order to get to freeway 401 that would take me to the border. As I exited 400 to go onto 407 I noticed the signage indicated this 407 was an ETR (express toll route). I hadn't planned on a toll road, but, oh, well, I was only going to be on it about 30 kilometers or so. But I never passed a tollbooth. At one point I did pass a sign that read "Non-Ontario drivers will be billed." Does someone in Canada have my. mailing address, I thought? I must check this out for it may be something that Americans can learn from Canadians about toll roads.

Wikipedia tells me that the 407 ETR is the world's first privately owned all electronically controlled highway. It was built by Canadian and Spanish investors to alleviate the traffic burdens of Ontario highway 401 which is deemed the busiest highway in North America. The complete highway is now 107 kilometers long. was on the 407 about 33 kilometers. There is a web site that helped me calculate my fee. For the time of day I was on the freeway I should be getting a bill for about $26 Canadian dollars. The highway is apparently quite controversial but use was quite heavy and I kept waiting for a toll booth . According to Wikipedia, only some U.S. states link their license plate registries with the highway. So I may or may not be billed for those 33 kilometers.

So summer is at an end even though it is only early August. My great nephew began first grade so it is time to get to work. Now I have but a short distance before returning to life with college seminarians.