Thursday Reflection

How about a few theological questions for you to ponder as the church community begins to once again walk into that spiritual wilderness known as Lent.

1. Do I ever take the time to reflect on why I am here and what God’s purpose for me has been or continues to be?

2. Perhaps the same question seen from a different angle: whose lives have been bettered because I have been a part of them?

3. If Lent is merely a time to “give up chocolate,” why am I wasting my time (and the Lord’s time) pretending the season has any meaning?

4. Like it or not, as an adult, I am a role model. As an adult Christian, I am supposed to model Christ. So what kind of Christ do others see when they watch me?

5. Is it easier to love your pet than to love other human beings, and if so, what does that say about your understanding of love?

6. Do I really believe in a Jesus who died to redeem even the one person in my life whom I can’t stand?

7. If I find that I am consistently being taken for granted, how do I react? What needs to change? 

8. To quote the Lord: “if you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? Even the pagans do that!”

9.  When was the last time I was actually and sincerely grateful to anyone working with me or for me?

10. If there is garbage in my life that keeps me from being happy and keeps me from being at peace with God, then when am I ever going to take out the garbage?

Happy Lent !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-- Fr. Joe

Thursday Reflection

I Think the Whole Country Could Use a Good Dose of a Holy Lent

In seven days, we Christians, no matter our denomination or tradition - except for Eastern Rite Christians who are a week behind us, liturgically speaking but that’s another story – will enter into the more somber and solemn season of Lent. During this forty day (more or less) period, we are all going to have the opportunity to take a “time out” and reflect (like Christians of a long forgotten era who had been undergoing periods of public penance) on how we having been living up to and in to our Baptism covenant. Are we thinking, feeling and acting as disciples of the Risen One who has called us into His life? Are we taking our own mortality and finiteness seriously as we take time out and listen to a call to once again “repent and believe in the Good News” of our redemption in Christ.

So far, this sounds like an Ash Wednesday sermon, doesn’t it? But I’d like to make this more graphic. Last Sunday, there is this wonderfully terse statement from Jesus about the meaning of YOUR words. “Say “yes’ when you mean ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when you mean ‘no’. Everything else comes from the Evil One.”

Haven’t we all just had enough of all the language fudging? Using sports as a microcosm for general culture, haven’t we heard enough about players who cheat, get caught and then demand that we look the other way. No one cheats: they are “getting an edge”. No one must be held accountable: they are too important a product making money for the owners and therefore must be protected from their responsibility. (Do any of you remember: “too big to fail” as a reason why banks had to be protected from their outrageous practices that brought the housing market down over a decade ago?) 

No one lies: they “misspeak” or “misremember” or “speak prematurely or have their spokesperson pump out explanations as to why you are at fault for challenging their (mis)statements. We now have “alternate truths,”  “Spinning” used to be a child’s game or the frightful result of a car on ice. Now it is a way to manufacture “your narrative” as opposed to objective truth – which doesn’t exist anyway as we are told.  

And the guardians of truth are hardly better. It seems that it is far more important to get the story “first” rather than get it ‘right”. A false account can get large type on page 1. A retraction and admission of inaccuracy will be buried on the lower left corner on p. 47 of section c-67.

Jesus taught that saying anything simply beyond the simple truths of “yes” and “no” is a product of the Evil One. Seems like a lot of Evil One stuff is going on. Seems to me like we as a nation really need to do some “repenting and believing” this Lent.                                                                                                              

-- Fr. Joe

Thursday Reflection

  I Really Do Not Deal With Change Very Well!

There was a time when I used to (secretly) make fun of my first pastor (and mentor) because I saw him as a person who struggled to deal with change in his life. I was the young assistant pastor, newly ordained, fresh from study, stocked full of new ideas and all chock full of ministerial fervor mixed in with an unhealthy dollop of self-aggrandizement. See things with my eyes! I speak for a new generation. My theories will prove more important that your facts or experience.  While my place in time prevented me from being a “millennial,” I certainly had my share of a twenty-something’s infallibility.

Funny how life’s journey has now placed me in the role of my mentor. I am hearing new voices uttering untested thoughts and theories even as I hear others holding on to the worldview and world they knew but which may no longer exist. How willing am I to listen to the voices of younger questioning voices? How many of my own presumptions am I willing to give up?

The parish had such an experience a year ago when it undertook the removal of buried oil tanks on the property? What if “back in the day” decades and decades ago there had been any voices warning that burying steel containers (which some day may leak or break apart) filled with an ultimately toxic substance such as heating oil just might not be the best idea. This is not just a parish matter but a planetary concern. 

I try so hard to not regurgitate all of my dad’s verbiage – you know, ye olde “when I was a kid…” – but I am living, yet again, in what is supposed to be a winter season in the northeast, knowing that when I was a kid the winters were certainly colder and snowier. No, I didn’t walk to school in snowstorms uphill both ways, but I can easily recall far more single digit temperature days and snowy treks to class (city kids almost never have a “snow day” off in elementary or high school) and having the opportunity to make some money shoveling “old people’s sidewalks.” Something is certainly different and strange going on, and I’d be a fool to shut my ears to those who ask us to take notice.

There was a time when stores gave out plastic bags so that we used fewer paper bags and ultimately fewer trees. Now plastic is bad and paper is good (if you pay for it) but in the end, how are we going to deal with the overcrowding of our landfills? Take a side trip to Utrecht in the Netherlands, and a block from the train station there is a huge plastic “whale like creature” that has been constructed from the plastic bottles and other containers that have washed into Dutch canals and dykes from the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. (This is not the ranting of an eco-terrorist. I saw this “art” disaster sculpture for myself last summer when I arrived in Utrecht.) I know we need to change our thinking and use of plastic, but am I really willing to listen and then change.

I was once a voice insisting upon change. Now I am part of a generation that often does not want to hear others insist upon the same thing. I hope I have not forgotten that this is really not merely an environmental issue or a political issue but a theological issue. Holy Scripture teaches that we have been created in the Divine image. We have been given a caretaker role – to be stewards of “this fragile earth, our island home.” (Eucharistic Prayer C) I often think I hear the words of my Savior telling me: “true, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if it is broke , then what are you going to do about it? That’s why I put you here!”  Are you listening?

-- Fr. Joe

Thursday Reflection

It’s all about ME!  - seriously?

I’m sitting at my desk with sports talk radio droning on in the background. The church office is empty now, and I’m taking a break from working on a report that is due in Diocesan Office on March 1. Usually radio noise is just that: noise in the background. But I found today’s rant between hosts fascinating. It seems that an ultra-star uber-rich quarterback who plays for an unnamed New England football team has put out some controversial photo of himself leading to speculation as to whether he will remain at his not-to-be-named team or is moving on. 

What’s fascinating to the program hosts is discovering what appears to be a shameless attempt on the part of this special athletic somebody - who is always the center of attention at Super Bowl time because his team, more often than not, plays in this game and he is used to being the center of attention - desperately trying to take the conversation away from the actual participants of the game. In fact, for whatever reason, he has even taken conversations away from the tragic death of a former star in another sport. The airways are now filled with defending the “new normal” – it’s all about ME, and it is intolerable that you think of anyone other than ME.

I’m not smirking. I’ve seen such attitudes play out in a variety of places – including ecclesiastical settings. I’ve seen scholars exude charm and tact and a willingness to enlighten others so long as those others defer to them and them alone. In the course of decades in both parish and diocesan settings, I have received the “don’t you know who I am?” treatment. It is said – and I don’t know whether this is true or a gross exaggeration and stereotype – that millennials live by this creed. It’s all about me!

I do know that I have encountered more than my share of not-very-bright drivers on Rt. 35 who cannot tolerate my already doing 50 in a 45 m.p.h. zone, and who race past in spite of double line and blocked vision from curves. They are too important to be held to the same standards as you or I. 

I keep hearing the need for “conversation” and “communication” as struggle with our changing mores on issues of race, gender, language, homelessness, fiscal fairness or any other topic. But I wonder: if the focus is only on ME, then how seriously is this quest for actual dialogue. If it’s only all about me, then why should I ever care what you or anyone else thinks? And by their behaviors, so many demonstrate that they really do not. 

Entitlement, self-absorption, being completely unaware of how one’s attitudes are perceived by others – all these dangerous traits seem to infect too many personalities, political positions, and even interpretations about what it means to be “church”. Is it about the mission of Jesus and the place to which we have been called? Is it about service, caring and the search for truth, or is it about how I feel, how important I am, how I need to get my way all the time. Is it about love or is it about me? In the so called sports world, self-aggrandizement may have become our new normal.  But has this become a description of our “real” lives as well?  

-- Fr. Joe