STLToday Faith Perspectives

Pope Francis’ encyclical a call for dialogue and compassion

Steve · January 25, 2021 · 1 Comment

This also appeared in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a “Faith Perspectives” commentary. If you’re a subscriber (or want to answer a few questions) you can view the Post online version here.

This past October, Pope Francis signed his third encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” on the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, his inspiration and namesake. In this message, he spoke to the entire world — not just Catholics — reinforcing the ideas and teachings of Jesus about how imperative it is to care for one another. In that sense, this encyclical is nothing new, but it perhaps could not have come at a better time.

In a country and world plagued by individualism, partisanship and violence, Francis invites us into dialogue. He invites us to embrace the message of the Gospel and a love that transcends physical and ideological geography and distance. He invites us to be open and accepting of others and especially those who seem most distant. For those who know and accept the teachings of Jesus, Francis’ words represent a commonsense application of Gospel values.

And yet, this call to love without borders in a polarized world is anything but common, even within the universal church. His message is a radical invitation to love as we have been loved by God. Such talk can often be heard in the general but not the specific. We love and care for the poor, of course, but we all too easily discard and dismiss them — the stranger, the immigrant, the “other.” There are “shadows over a closed world,” to quote the encyclical, and yet there is also hope.

There is hope in the parable of the Good Samaritan the Pope uses to illustrate and underline his letter. In this story, a man is beaten, robbed and left for dead at the side of a road. After being ignored by some leading citizens, the man is saved by a foreigner who finds the compassion required when it would have been easier to just look the other way. The point? Jesus teaches that “our neighbors” are not only those with whom we agree or politically align ourselves. Our neighbors are not just those who live in our neighborhoods and on our side of the artificial divides we have erected. Our neighbor, as Jesus taught so succinctly, is whoever is in need.

For true compassion does not care where the person in need comes from or what he or she believes. It does not stoop to judge before stooping to help. It just reaches down and picks up. It pays out of its own pocket without pausing to count the cost.

“Fratelli Tutti” asks us to begin to envision a world where every person is deemed worthy and valuable, where each can live in dignity because they are seen as integral and valuable parts of the whole. The encyclical asks us to think and act as one community, battling the structural causes of inequality and poverty, caring for the most vulnerable among us. It asks us to be fundamentally open to each other and especially to those on the margins of society. It invites us into the realization that we will be saved together or not at all.

Sitting at the crux of all this is a call to genuine dialogue and friendship, the kind that approaches, speaks, listens, sees, comes to know and finds common ground with the other. At that meeting point, we might come to know that both sides benefit from the exchange. We might learn in this encounter that no one is expendable. We might learn to integrate our differences instead of standing on them and not allowing the other to pass. We might learn that aggression and monologues get us nowhere.

Instead, in dialogue we learn to create paths forward toward peace and healing. Inspired not only by Francis of Assisi but also by Martin Luther King Jr. of America, Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Mahatma Gandhi of India, Pope Francis’ hope for his encyclical is that it becomes a “splendid secret that shows us how to dream and turn our life into a wonderful adventure.”

In a concluding ecumenical prayer, the Pope prays that we all may be seen as, “important and necessary, different faces of the one humanity that God so loves.” That’s a good dream for 2021.

Advent 2020: Welcome to the ‘Demented Inn’

Steve · November 28, 2020 · 2 Comments

We Christians are entering into what will likely be one of the strangest and most distracted Advent and Christmas seasons that most of us will ever experience. Many of us will hunker down and stay apart from our loved ones, unable to celebrate and gather as we usually do. Advent and Christmas services will stream online or occur with just a fraction of carefully spaced church members.

Many will grieve the loss of the season and the ability to embrace those we love, even as we grieve those who have been lost to us during this strange and pandemic year. And yet, for those who celebrate the season of Advent as prayerful preparatory to the celebration of the birth of Jesus two millennia ago, this time — even in the midst of a pandemic spike — might just be the opportunity we need to reconnect with the God who, so we believe, stooped to become one of us.

“Advent may be the best time of year to consider what will come out of the pandemic we are suffering through, for this liturgical season reminds us of our time of hope at a time when it can be difficult to find hope in the world,” writes Fr. Joe Tetlow, SJ, in the current issue of Jesuits Central and Southern. “As the virus seeps everywhere, nothing could make us more hopeful than remembering that our Creator and Lord has come into our flesh.”

Advent is traditionally seen as a time of hope for Christians who celebrate the season. Even in such a seemingly hopeless time as now, we wait and hope to welcome Christ once again into the world. It’s a time to challenge ourselves to consider whether we might, unlike the innkeepers in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, make room for a wandering, poor, seemingly homeless young couple looking for a place to get warm and bring a new life into the world. That’s the question we get to ask ourselves: Do we have the courage to open the door and make room?

In his 1965 essay, “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room,” the late poet, author, mystic and Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote:

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied status as persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world.”

I’m not sure there has been another time in my 60 years that I have felt so much like I was living in a “demented inn.” The world seems wracked in pain — in disease, in social and political unrest, and in every conceivable kind of violence. And yet, we believe, Christ comes — has come and continues to come — to those who believe. Whether we invite him or not, whether we are aware or not, Christ is present. He is not far away, waiting on a high mountain for us to struggle up to him. He is not buried deep in the rubble of history waiting for us to excavate him. Rather, he is present to us in the warmth and safety of our quarantine.

And if we really believe that, we must be willing to become aware of all the others to whom he has come as well. Our faith compels us to respond and lift up — now more than ever and in unimaginably charitable and just ways — the poor, the homeless, the wandering young families looking for shelter and warmth. We must be willing to provide safe spaces in the demented inn.

If during Advent we welcome Jesus and turn away the stranger at the door, we fail to live up to the promise of hope that we say stirs in us at Christmas. If we want to show the world the “true meaning of Christmas,” if we want to really “keep Christ in Christmas,” then we must let it find us loving and caring for each other.

Standing Between Hopelessness and Hope

Steve · July 17, 2020 · 6 Comments

This originally appeared as a “Faith Perspectives” column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on July 13, 2020.

Over the past few weeks, I have taken part in more than a few online, faith-based presentations and dialogues focused on issues surrounding racial injustice in America. But even as we gather to help find our places and voices in the ongoing conversations, protests and proposed solutions to racial injustice and violence, we find ourselves in the liminal and paradoxical space that exists between hopelessness and hope.

With the exception of presenters and panelists who are people of color, these have been, by and large, conversations among white Catholics who profess to care deeply about the injustice and violence experienced by so many of our black and brown brothers and sisters.

We have gathered at the request and invitation of a wide range of Catholic institutions and religious orders, including the Archdiocese of St. Louis, the Marianists, the Jesuits and the Dominicans, and no doubt there were many more of these happening that I did not attend. As a Church, we’re good at gathering. It is the act of gathering, indeed, that makes us Church.

Of course, we all expressed that we feel helpless because the issues are so big, so old and so seemingly impossible. The virtual venues changed, but the questions remained the same: What should we be doing? What is our role here as a Church and as people of faith? We want so much to be hopeful. We search for signs that this time is different and find glimpses of goodness and light. We see more people who look like us taking part in peaceful protests. We see parents doing their best to learn about and explain racism to their children with a belief that they can, over time, slow or break the unrelenting and terrible cycle.

Some Catholics are becoming bold and outspoken in their belief that they cannot be prolife for unborn lives and not when lives are adolescent or adult and black or brown. We see more people willing to pause their lives and listen to and learn from others who live and experience racism every day. But talk is never enough. Education alone is never adequate. Faith without works is dead.

Despite what centuries of European art and iconography try to reveal, as Christians we pin our hope on the life, death and resurrection of a brown, Jewish man from a working-class village in the Galilean countryside. He doesn’t look like us. Surely, somehow, we can choose to remember that fact when we are tempted to think that the current unrest has nothing to do with us.

Jesus, if he was walking the earth today, would look less like the people gathered on my Zoom conference call and more like the gentlemen from Mexico or El Salvador who mow the grass in my neighborhood. He would look more like George Floyd or Rayshard Brooks than the people I gather to worship with on Sunday. So the questions we must ask are straightforward: How would we treat Jesus if we caught him running through our neighborhood late at night? What would we say about him and what would we call him if we thought he wasn’t listening? What excuses would we make about how he “had it coming” even as we drove the nails into his hands?

And yet there is room and need for hope, and so I will kneel and pray to God for the gift of hope in the midst of hopelessness. I will incline my ear and wait in hope for a response from a God who I believe listens to his people. But like people of all ages and colors who have prayed for so long and so hard for that same hope, I will ask God to please hurry.

Kindness must follow faith

Steve · May 16, 2020 · 4 Comments

This originally appeared as a “Faith Perspectives” column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 15, 2020.

During a safe and appropriately socially distanced online gathering recently, singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer had this to say about what is required during this time of fear, confusion and isolation: “Kindness is love’s country cousin. It shows up and does the dishes without asking. Kindness —not grand gestures — will save the world. Love is big and hard to get our arms around. Kindness is human sized and changes everything.”

I paused for several weeks before considering how I might write about all that is going on (and not going on) in the world right now. After all, what could I say about the Corona virus and its effects on society that hasn’t been said in a hundred different ways by a thousand different writers? After a few days of such pondering, I landed on the need for the kind of kindness that is “human sized and changes everything.”

“Being kind” is, on one hand, obvious and simple. We teach it to both our toddlers and our dogs. But it is, on the other hand, perhaps the very best we have to offer right now, and it seems to be showing up in abundance. People are finding creative and appropriate ways to reach out in kindness and care for each other, even though they are — and must be — isolated from each other. Social media, for all its shortcomings, is at least giving us access to these moments of light right now. We are seeing nearly constant examples of those who are doing what they can to make the world a little brighter and connected in a time of uncertainty and distance.

Musicians are posting free “concerts” from their living rooms and kitchens. Publications are giving free access to content. People are supporting local restaurants and other businesses while maintaining that safe and critical distance. Churches and ministers are offering worship services, counseling and spiritual direction virtually, and the flock is lining up to use them.

And, of course, there are those who continue to provide direct services to those in need because they continue to respond to their chosen vocations, even knowing that it puts them and their families at risk. First responders and medical professionals head up that list, but those who stock our grocery stores, take away our trash, keep us informed and repair our infrastructure also deserve our gratitude. The next time we are tempted to complain about what’s not on the shelves, let’s look around and see everything that is. And let’s remember to leave enough for the next person in line.

For Christians, “being kind” is an imperative response to the gift of love we say we have received through Jesus. If we really believe that the greatest commandment is to love God with all of our hearts, souls and minds and to love our neighbors as much as (or more than) we love ourselves, then we must be prepared to do the very best and most kind things we can do right now. For most of us, that means staying inside and using the technology we have to stay in touch, to deliver comfort, to be creative and shed a little light on a world that has grown a little darker.

For those who must leave home and family to serve the rest of us, know that our gratitude and prayers go with you into the dark recesses of the human pain and suffering you must encounter and touch. We could use a few grand gestures of love and change right now, but let’s not give up on the small kindnesses that will continue to save the world.

So stay where you need to be. Wash your hands. Follow the rules. Feel our prayers, and be held in the palm of God’s hand.

Learning to Ponder in the Age of Social Media

Steve · February 16, 2020 · 2 Comments

This originally appeared as a “Faith Perspectives” column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on February 13, 2020.

In an age when impersonal communication happens at lightning-fast speeds and with often very little thought or time given to the responses we make other than the very first — and often the most vitriolic — thought that enters our heads, we might all be wise to consider the time-tested virtues of pondering.

Pondering is not merely thinking or daydreaming or simply observing. It’s the work of paying attention and being open, of connecting the facts of the situation with a greater sense of presence, of recognition of the small within the whole, of finding meaning and perhaps even God in the things and actions of the Earth and of our own lives. All that doesn’t come easy at a time when we can tell someone hundreds or thousands of miles away exactly what we think of their inane idea 30 seconds after they post it and ten seconds after we have formed a response in our gut and before it has spent even a fleeting moment in our conscience minds. Such willingness on our part to slow down and ponder takes intention.