Today's Word

The Seven Last Words: Forgive

Steve · March 20, 2016 · Leave a Comment

During the hours when Jesus hung on the cross leading up to his death, he uttered seven “words” (actually short sentences, as recorded across the four gospels), and these words continue to be meaningful and insightful to us today if we’re willing to spend some time in quiet with them. For they are not only remembrances of that day and of Jesus’ suffering and death, but also serve as reminders of how we are to live in our own moments of suffering. As we enter Holy Week, I offer seven short reflections on these words and ask you to consider what they might mean to you, today.

One: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Luke 23:33-34

We arrive at the place hauntingly called Golgotha (the Skull), where Jesus and his cross are lifted into place on that ugly hill, a criminal to his left and right. Jesus is tired, wounded and bloody from the torture he has experienced and from the long walk to Golgotha carrying his own instrument of death. He owes nothing to anyone.

Put in his situation (or one similar to it), what would our first words be to the crowd gathered before us? Perhaps something along these lines: “Stop! I have done nothing wrong! I don’t deserve this! This isn’t supposed to happen to me! You’ve got the wrong guy.”

Jesus, instead, turns away from hatred, denial and retribution and toward love, acceptance and forgiveness: “Forgive them, Father. They are just incapable of knowing what it is they are doing. As painful as this is for me, as unjust as the whole situation is, please, just forgive them.”

As we face (or contemplate) our own moments of suffering and death, we are asked to consider Jesus, the gentle healer and forgiver. Will we be able to reach deep beyond the pain and turn the situation to love? Will we be able to forgive those who have hurt us, who have left us feeling alone or with a burden that has been nearly too great to bear?

Ask yourself in silence: What will be the legacy of my suffering? Will it be more pain for someone else or a turn toward the kind of love modeled for me on the cross? Even as I exit, can I leave love behind?

Tomorrow: Paradise

Today’s Word: Resonance

Steve · October 26, 2015 · 5 Comments

flower — Resonant Beauty, just outside Taos. SJG photo

Yesterday at mass at Assumption Church in Lauderdale By the Sea, Florida, (where we are visiting for a week) the musicians played a song that I hadn’t heard in many years, although it was popular back in the early days of “liturgical folk music” when I was coming of age as a Catholic and as a musician. Hearing its simple melody once again, something deep inside resonated, like I was connected once more to that earlier time. That’s what music does. It resounds in us as a myriad of elements — musical notes, chords, silences and words, but also memories, poetry, other bits of music — all come together to create something new. Taken separately, none of these elements are as powerful as when they come together and resonate in our hearts and heads.

This song, titled “All I Ask of You” and composed by Gregory Norbert and recorded by the Monks of Western Priory, includes this simple and prayerful refrain: “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you.” But as those words and the voices of other worshippers poured over me, I realized that something even deeper was resonating in me — the meaning of the words.

What resonated was the thought that these few lines so simply and beautifully retold Jesus’ great commandment to us — that we are to love God with all of our hearts, minds and souls, and that we are to love those around us as much as we love ourselves. If we could somehow reduce our lives to these essential elements of love, we could certainly begin to believe and hope that we had lived as God wants us to live. And we would be remembered for that.

All we ask (friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, Facebook friends, strangers, neighbors, those in need, those with plenty) is that if you remember us, you will remember us as loving you. Nothing else matters.

All we ask (God) is that you remember us loving others and loving you. Nothing else matters.

Ask yourself in silence: How will those around me remember me? How will God remember me?

Today’s Word: Death

Steve · April 4, 2015 · 7 Comments

stones — New Orleans cemetery. SJG photo.

There is no death! The stars go down
To rise upon some other shore…
— John L. McCreery

These three days of the Christian liturgical year — the Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday — tell the story of Jesus’ final days and minutes and, at the same time, remind us all of the one inevitable moment that hangs like the tarnished old chandelier in the midst of our living rooms: our own deaths. For even as we hope and anticipate the day of Christ’s resurrection, even as we trust in our own “something else” beyond these mortal days on earth, it is death that holds our attention now. And that’s the point. There is no death without first living, and there is no life beyond without first dying to this world.

Yesterday I had the honor of being a pallbearer at the funeral of my Godmother, my 88-year-old Aunt Ruth. Although I didn’t get to see her much in her later years — perhaps once a year at our family reunion — she and her late husband, Fred, hold important and iconic places in my life and memory. She was a woman of exquisite beauty and deep faith. She was always impeccably dressed, and never was a hair out of place. She was, using that old word that just doesn’t get used enough these days, elegant. She was likely the first elegant woman I ever knew.

The daughter of a Baptist preacher who married into our largely German Protestant family, she and Uncle Freddie were also the elder spiritual leaders of the extended Eickmeyer (my paternal grandmother’s) clan, the people to whom we turned to say an eloquent and faith-filled grace before our reunion and Christmas meals. No one else ever seemed willing or equipped to do so, so God bless the Baptists! In later years when she could not be present, those gathered began turning to me to say the prayer, a mantle I have been honored to assume. The family’s faith has spread out over the years to include a variety of expressions, including a few Catholics like me, as well as others who don’t profess any faith at all and yet hold on to these few sacred moments of family with heads bowed and eyes tightly closed. Grace indeed.

Funerals are always a reminder of our own mortality, of course. Some shrink back from them, not wishing to experience death so up close and personal. Others are able to embrace and celebrate these moments, finding in them, perhaps, that this three-fold journey of life and death into life is one we all share. Exactly what passage lies between the realms we cannot say beyond conjecture or article of faith. We want to believe, as the minister stated so beautifully yesterday, that it is merely a heartbeat that separates us from what awaits us on the other side of the veil. We’ll see. Indeed, we’ll see. For now, as the Christian band MercyMe sings, we can only imagine:

I can only imagine what it will be like.
When I walk by your side.
I can only imagine what my eyes will see.
When your face is before me.
I can only imagine.

See video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lrrq_opng

I kind of like cemeteries. I enjoy a leisurely walk among the stone and trees. Like funerals in general, they stand sentinel and serve as constant reminders that there is more to this life than what meets the eye. But neither do I believe there is much beneath those stones other than the biological waste of dusty bones. Whoever these souls are that so enthralled us when they were alive and among us, they certainly don’t lie beneath the rolling hills and engraved memorials. So I’ll end with this, with the hope of heaven and resurrection waiting just over the next dawn. Happy Easter.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

— Mary Elizabeth Frye

Ask yourself in silence: What do I believe about what comes next? What are my hopes? My fears? What does my faith tell me?

Today’s Word: Available

Steve · March 21, 2015 · 1 Comment

clock — Chronos. St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans. SJG photo.

Evidently, the vast majority of Americans believe that the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” comes from the Bible. In fact, it was uttered by the wise old founding father Ben Franklin who, although clever and all that, is hardly a reliable source for Christian social teaching. For Franklin’s witticism is not only non-biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Indeed, it could not be further from the call to service and love that we find in the gospels.

For if we profess to be Christian, we have no choice but to love and care for those around us. And who is “around us?” Who is our neighbor? As the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) teaches us, our neighbor is anyone who is in need. So we must ask ourselves today: Is there anyone in need around us? If we say no, we’re either looking with half-closed eyes or our world is far too narrow.

We are called to make ourselves available to others. In Ignatian spirituality, this is referred to as “apostolic availability.” We must be there for others. We must be the healing and comforting Christ for others. We are called to bring the “good news” of the Gospel to others, but with the knowledge that salvation comes in different forms. We tell of a Jesus who saves and promises life to come, yes. But we are also called to bring the good news of the here and now. I love this from Dean Brackley, SJ:

Jesus proclaims “Good News to the poor.” What is this Good News? Ask  the poor — you will get clear and immediate answers: health, shelter, food, opportunity, jobs, education.

The challenge of responding to this call to service is that our lives often make us so UN-available. We fill our lives with so many things — including many good things — that we leave no time to just be available if someone needs us, no time to go looking for someone who might need us, no time to call someone up and say, “do you need anything?”

art — Kairos. Jackson Square, New Orleans. SJG photo.

This is the difference between the Greek ideas of chronos time and kairos time. Chronos time rules our days. It is ordered time — seconds, minutes, hours — and it is a demanding taskmaster from the moment the clock goes off in the morning. It’s necessary, of course. But it is not all. Kairos, on the other hand, lies outside of this sequential time of clocks and calendars. It is the time that slips by in moments of quiet contemplation and prayer. It passes without notice in moments of service to others. It is fleeting in moments of creation and joy, when time seems to stand still. It is time outside of time.

We need chronos, of course, or nothing would run on time and the world would run amok. But we need times of kairos in a chronos world. We need big chunks of time when we’re not watching the clock, when we’re not worried about the next appointment. We need this time to be available to God and available to others. This availability — this love — doesn’t come free or even cheap. It will cost us something. As Sarah Thebarge, author of The Invisible Girls, writes:

Love will cost you dearly.
And it will break your heart.
But in the end, it will save the world.

Ask yourself in silence: To whom can I be available today? What will it cost me? Will it be worth it?

Today’s Word: Glory

Steve · January 30, 2015 · 1 Comment

clarinet — Glory: Live your life like this. New Orleans musician Doreen Ketchens. SJG photo.

It’s not a word — glory —that most of us use much on a daily basis, I suppose. It’s a bit old fashioned, perhaps, and reserved for a few special things. The wonders of nature tend to be “glorious,” and the flag of my country is sometimes referred to as “Old Glory.” At church we’re likely to hear and sing it often. We might think about “glorifying God” by our words and actions, but how exactly do we go about doing that and does God even need us to glorify him? “Glory, glory,” as some of my elders used to say in exasperation…where to begin?

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