Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute–no execptions

Jesus said to his disciples:

“To you who hear I say, love your enemies,

do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you,

pray for those who mistreat you.

To the person who strikes you on one cheek,

offer the other one as well,

and from the person who takes your cloak,

do not withhold even your tunic.

Give to everyone who asks of you,

and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

For if you love those who love you,

what credit is that to you?

Even sinners love those who love them.

And if you do good to those who do good to you,

what credit is that to you?

Even sinners do the same.

If you lend money to those from whom you expect repayment,

what credit is that to you?

Even sinners lend to sinners,

and get back the same amount.

But rather, love your enemies and do good to them,

and lend expecting nothing back;

then your reward will be great

and you will be children of the Most High,

for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

Be merciful, just as also your Father is merciful. (Luke 6)

Today’s readings are very applicable to what is happening here and now. Christianity is very much about our lived experience. I will pick out two: the political campaign and the situation in Libya and say that Jesus’ teaching in Luke is not to be waived. In culture, Christians have always been called and challenged to stand over against the prevailing culture. For example, see Paul’s prohibition against eating food sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians.

My point number one is that “love your enemies” applies even in the heat of an election that raises serious issues about values.

Second, “love your enemies” also applies to our reaction to the assassination of Foreign Service officers in Libya. There is no excuse nor justification for this egregious and unconscionable act. The perpetrators must be brought to justice. The Libyan people are apologizing for what a few misguided extremists did. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” applies. The vitriol I have seen in the press and on blogs has no place in Christian parlance. Muslims are not barbarians as one blogger asserted. Blowing Muslims into oblivion is not an option.

We are no better than nonbelievers if we love only those who love us. This is another of Jesus’s hard teachings but, like Peter,  to whom else shall we go? These are the words of eternal life lived now.

August 6

Writing about the idolatry of power, violence and war in the National Catholic Reporter, John Dear said:

That might be our greatest problem. We Americans have deluded ourselves into thinking we can have both. We can have God and nukes, God and money, God and Wall Street, God and empire, God and weapons of war. The psalmist, and the Berrigans, insist it’s one or the other. God does not allow for other gods. The minute we give in to our worship of these false gods, we reject the living God of peace. Then we continue further down the path of spiritual death.

The psalmist (Psalm 115) names the idols as inhuman and ungodly, and the idolaters as inhuman and ungodly, too. We need to name the idols of today as inhuman and ungodly, too, and help each other resist the culture’s idolatry so that we can become more human and more Godly. (http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/psalms-peace-part-five-ps-115) Continue reading

Pilgrimage

The feast of St. James reminds us of the phenomenon of pilgrimage. Annually, thousands of pilgrims make the Camino across northern Spain to the cathedral of St. James in Santiago. Likewise, thousands of Muslims annually make the pilgrimage to the Kaba in Mecca. Pious Muslims experience their pilgrimage as a resurrection. For hundreds of years, Celtic monks journeyed to find the place of their resurrection. Catherine Doherty in Proustinia describes Russian holy people who do pilgrimage “for those who have no holy restlessness and who do not want to arise and seek God.” (20)

Sacred journeys are transformative; they quench our holy restlessness—our hearts are restless until they rest in God (Augustine of Hippo). Merton considered pilgrimage to be an inner journey in search of finding his true self. Muhammad believed, contrary to Western stereotypes, that the greater jihad was the internal struggle of iman–internalizing the core of Islamic belief and practice into our daily lives. Merton relied a great deal on the work of Muslim Reza Aresteh on Final Integration to shape his mystical belief in the emergence of the true self.

As in Western theology, Allah is transcendent and imminent. Tanzih refers to God as unknowable; tashin speaks of God as manifest in creatures and creation. Speaking of Allah as manifest, Merton taught the novices in his charge about the 99 names of Allah. More importantly he told them that each person has a name by which Allah is known and by which Allah knows the person. As I was listening to Merton’s talk, my consciousness was jolted as the word “Beloved” exploded within me. It was a powerful God-experience. I am the Beloved of God and God is my Beloved who leaps over hills and bounds over crags to enter into union with me. Knowing I am “Beloved” puts me on a new leg on my pilgrimage. Knowing the Beloved and being known as the Beloved, in the words of Paul in Ephesians, is now “rooting and grounding” me in what Rohr describes as deep abundance. I know the truth (1 Jn 2:21)–I am Beloved.

On our journey, our greatest struggle is indeed with what Paul called “the flesh,” not the body as such but rather the false self seeking meaning and fulfillment apart from God and godly service to humankind. We have to let go. We have to stop seeking false truth. We have to stop putting our ladder of success against the wrong wall and climbing nowhere.

I think the religious metamyth that cuts across all credal boundaries is that we are more than we are. We can become more than what we are. Pilgrimage is then the journey to become what we are in the imago Dei–the image of God in which we came into being. Our experiences along the way, whether it be the hajj, the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in search of resurrection, or the proustinia’s trek, help us to become what we are. Eastern Christian theology says that God became human so that we might become divine. Pilgrimage is a transformative process.

We journey on with hope in our hearts knowing that the trials along the way are refining us like fire refines silver. In one of his talks on Sufism, Merton told the novice monks, “Get rid of your despair. Stir up your hope.” Why? God wants you to know God so you can enter into deeper union with God. We journey in the power of the Spirit of the Living God who is calling us to be what we are. We “recite” God’s name for us and our name for God with each step we take.

Tougher to Get into Heaven

Georgia and many other states have adopted tougher documentation requirements to get a drivers license supposedly to prevent ID theft but really to weed out undocumented aliens. If this trend goes heavenward, we all might be in trouble. Click on the cartoon to enlarge it.

Mend Thine Every Flaw

On Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, I, as a peace activist, feel very out of sync. I see the flags flying on the houses and mail boxes. I hear patriotic hymns at church. I see soldiers holding the pin flags at golf tournaments. I see soldiers who are going to be deployed back to Afghanistan where some of them will died or be maimed for life being bussed to a ball game in Atlanta amid great media hype. I struggle time with this. Now, thanks to Rabbi Lerner, I know that I am not the Lone Ranger:

Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.

This year that kind of celebration is particularly difficult when many of us are deeply upset as we watch our government escalating its policy of drones, still fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan, running elections in which only the super-rich or their allies stand a chance of being taken seriously by the corporate media, watching as the distance between rich and poor becomes ever wider, while education and social programs for the poor get defunded, the Supreme Court reaffirms the right of corporations to on donate without limit to political campaigns, the environment reaches beyond the tipping point and nobody even bothers to pretend that they are going to do something to repair the ecological crisis, and the government passes legislation that in effect does away with habaeus corpus and the right of people to a trial by their peers (by legislating life imprisonment without trial for anyone the government suspects of being a foreign operative, including US citizens), and dispirited by the lack of vision of the Democratic Party, and the dis-unity and nit-picking on the Left which seems to only know what it is against but has not yet developed a coherent vision of what it is for!  Oy. Continue reading

Lament

The entire chapter in Lamentations 2 grips me; however, this verse laid siege to my heart:

In vain they ask their mothers,

“Where is the grain?”

As they faint away like the wounded

in the streets of the city,

And breathe their last

in their mothers’ arms.

Children dying in their mothers’ arms while we live in comfort. This happens thousands of times every day. If it is not drought and a lack of food, it is contaminated water that takes a toll. As I lament I am plagued by the picture a photographer took several years ago—a squatting, emaciated starving-to-death child being watched by a vulture. The photographer Carter “eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it. ‘I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up,’ he confided in a friend. Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the little girl’s fate, he committed suicide three months later.” (http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/vulture-stalking-a-child/)

Lamentation, like praise, has a place in our prayers. Lamentation can be a powerful tool as we just sit with tragedy and loss. Several years ago, Richard Rohr had a conference where we were invited to don sackcloth stoles and choose a place and position for lamentation. Lamentation is about sorrow,

Weeping and grieving. Faced with war and rumors of war, greedy banksters, the demise of the economy, starvation, poverty, environmental destruction, the decline of the middle class, political acrimony and the like we have plenty to grieve.

John Jacob Niles, famous Kentucky composer, and Thomas Merton, famous Kentucky monk, came together in what is known as the Niles-Merton Songs—Merton lamentation poems put to music. Kathleen Deignan describes Merton’s lament for the destruction of the environment (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Cross-Currents/198114916.html).

Maybe we can use the famous photograph to grieve our way into action, gratitude and, eventually, blessing for all.

St. John’s Bonfires

Beautiful Inis Oirr

Today, June 24, is the feast day of John the Baptizer. Traditionally John has been seen as the cousin of Jesus. John probably was a member of the Qumran sect that practiced frequent baptisms and ablutions. Hence, he called forth Jesus to prophetic ministry.

This feast day takes me back to Ireland in 2008. We were on the smallest of the Aran Islands, Inis Oirr, for the annual week-long bodhran school and festival. On these islands it is not unusual to see residents driving their tractors to the pubs–there are three pubs on this tiny island which faces the distant Cliffs of Mohr. On the days leading up to the feast of John the Baptizer, I noticed tractors and cars with trailers hauling trash and piling it atop the highest hill on the island. I began to wonder what was going on. Further investigation with Brid, our bed and breakfast hostess, indicated that they were building a bonfire.

At this point on the year, the sun starts to wane toward winter when, in Celtic thought, it loses its heat. The bonfire is to restore heat to the sun for a longer growing season. The Celts have always had the uncanny knack of blending of creation spirituality with traditional Christian feasts and practices. The Celts honor John the Baptizer by building bon fires to the cosmic sun.

Of course, the bonfires predate the Baptist. It’s one of those pagan customs co-opted by the Church when she co-opted Midsummer Night, exorcising its demons and baptizing whatever was harmless merriment. Now that the mighty prophet John owns June 24th, we can safely laugh at demons, fairies, leprechauns, and the other assorted lower classes of fallen angels thought to inhabit forests, rivers, meadows, and underground caves.  Hence the fitness of Shakespeare’s comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  In this story, fairies take advantage of the power they have on this night to inflict magical love spells on hapless mortals who fall into the crossfire of a dispute between the King and Queen of the fairy kingdom. The redeemed can safely laugh at such things, since they have no reason to fear them. (http://catholicexchange.com/john-the-baptist-bonfires/)

Or, as another source puts it:

June 24 is one of the oldest of the Church feasts. It is the birthday celebration of St. John the Baptist, and is sometimes called “summer Christmas.” On the eve of the feast, great bonfires were once lighted as a symbol of “the burning and brilliant” light, St. John, who pointed out Christ in this world of darkness. The solstice fires had been pagan, but now they were blessed by the Church in John’s honor. There are actual blessings for the bonfire in the Roman liturgy. Magical and superstitious elements of food and drink were forgotten, and we were encouraged to have great picnic feasts out-of-doors around the blazing logs. [http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/activities/view.cfm?id=461]

Years earlier we were on a bus tour in beautiful, lush green rolling hills of Wales. As we were walking after supper, we met a Welsh woman who engaged us in conversation and insisted on taking us to the sacred well. Reluctantly we accompanied her as she muttered, “Oh me heart, O, me heart.” But, we made it to the well. Again, the people have maintained an affinity to nature around them—sacred wells and sacred rivers. On the trip to Inis Oirr, I rambled about the island until finally I located St. Enda’s well. Not much of a well but a reminder of the missionary who converted the early inhabitants of Inis Oirr.

Thomas Merton always maintained a close relationship to the nature around him. At one point in his monastic career, the abbot made him forester of the monastery so Merton could nurture his love of creation. Speaking of the Welsh, I just learned that Merton’s mother, Ruth, who was from New York and his father, Owen, who was from New Zealand were both of Welsh ancestry. No wonder Merton was Celtic through and through. One only has to read Merton’s writings to understand his close communion at the altar of creation. Merton writes:

The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate beings, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God.

Their inscape is their sanctity. It is the imprint of His wisdom and His reality in them. (In Kathleen Deignan, When the Tress Say Nothing, 49)

All creation is sacred. The cosmos is holy. We are part of the ongoing handiwork of the Living One. We are the stardust from the initial Flaring Forth. The energy within our matter and the matter that is our energy is of the Living One.

James Finley, former student of Merton’s and a psychotherapist, says that “the root of suffering is estrangement from spiritual experience.” Estranged we are if we are cut off from our cosmic roots in the divine. Holiness is wholeness and the Living One wants us to have life and everything we need. (Jn 10:10) The feast of John the Baptist and the far-away cosmic bonfires remind us that baptism in water immerses us in creation.

Take a Break

Ah dear Sancho, the breeze is strong today

carrying with it the sweet smell of orange blossoms

and rain soaked earth

 

Perhaps it is best to tilt,

not our lances,

but our helmets to the sun

lie in the grass

and celebrate the beauty of this grand day

 

The giants will return tomorrow

as they always do

 

– Tom Ricker (http://quixote.org/don-quixote-makes-peace-with-windmills)

It’s about Justice, Folks

Touche!

“Beware of church leaders who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in churches, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation.”

A stern statement indeed. Yet, as a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter states–the bishops are in last phase of their death gasp. Merton believed that they were intent on erecting tombstones over their own graves. We need to stop worrying about them and get on with being Christian without them. (http://ncronline.org/news/women-religious/essay-power-dying-hierarchy-illusion). Continue reading

Jesus Addresses the Graduates

c. J. Patrick Mahon

A creative writer posted a daily reflection on the Creighton web site in which he featured Jesus as the commencement speaker at Creighton. I liked his creativity and decided to write my own Jesus commencement speech. Conservative Catholics have tried to block Secretary Sibelius from speaking at Georgetown’s commencement and also Desmond Tutu at Gonzaga’s commencement. Not truly understanding Jesus’ message they would probably picket his commencement address at U. S. International University. The university president and the board of trustees ignored the massive campaign from the Catholic League to prevent me from being with you today. To find out why read on.

President Smith, members of the board of trustees, distinguished faculty, parents, students and graduates. I am so glad you invited me to address you today. Many of you are scratching your heads and wondering— Why would they ask a bearded guy in long robes who was crucified as a common criminal 2000 years ago to speak to you today? Continue reading