2020/05/10 — 5th Sunday of Easter — Year A

Better late than never, I hope, here are some thoughts about the Mass readings for May 10.

After two Sundays in which the first reading, from Acts, gave portions of Peter's address to the people on Pentecost, today we skip forward — past the healing of the cripple and Peter and John's subsequent run-in with the Sanhedrin — to the event which is generally regarded as the establishment of the diaconate. Acts 6:1-7. There are several elements to consider.

• The initial duty of the deacons was "to serve at table." Feeding the hungry is one of the "corporal works of mercy" which gain one entry into he kingdom of the Father, according to Matthew 25:35.
• The duty of overseeing the distribution is an item of control over community goods. In subsequent centuries, deacons came to be responsible for administering the goods of the Church. From their intimate knowledge of church administration, they were often considered ideal candidates to succeed deceased bishops (including popes).
• But the first deacons also had to be "reputable men, filled with the Spirit and wisdom." These qualities led Stephen to proclaim the gospel of Jesus as Messiah boldly and irrefutably, leading to his martyrdom Acts 6-7. Philip also evangelized, and he baptized the Ethiopian eunuch. Acts 8:4-8, 26-40.

Eventually, the diaconate came to be treated as the final step of preparation for priesthood. When the Second Vatican Council called for the restoration of the diaconate as a permanent ministry, the primary focus was on the ministry of service (but not broader administration within the Church). The ministries of word (including proclaiming the gospel at Mass and at least occasional preaching) and sacrament (baptizing, ministering Communion, serving at the altar during Mass, and presiding at weddings and funerals outside Mass) were also part of the restored diaconate. It is tempting to read "serve at table" expansively to include serving at the altar table.

For the other readings, I'll quote what I wrote about the three years ago.

In the second reading — 1 Peter 2:4-9 — we have a metaphor of stones. Christ is a living stone, and we too are to be living stones built into a "spiritual house," the Church, with Jesus as the foundation. As parts of the Church, we are not inert. Being living stones, we are to be a priesthood, offering sacrifices to God. Of course the most important sacrifice is the one in which we join with the Church as the Church unites with Jesus in offering the sacrifice of Calvary. Beyond that, through Christ we can offer our personal sacrifices to the Father by enduring sufferings and obeying God's will as we understand it.


The gospel — John 14:1-12 — presents a scene at the Last Supper. First,  Jesus promises that he will prepare a place for the disciples (and us) in his Father's house and he will take us there. He tells Thomas that he is the only way to the Father, the truth, and the (eternal) life. He assures Philip [not the deacon we read abut in acts, but the apostle] that his identification with the Father is so close that to see him is the same as seeing the Father.

Although Jesus is the sole way to the Father, we are told in Matthew 25:31-46 that explicit faith in him is not required. Works of mercy toward his least brothers are sufficient.

The Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father, so that he is the image of the Father. In the same way, the parable of the vine and the branches, John 15:1-10, tells that Jesus is in us and we are in Jesus, which makes us images of him and, by extension, of the Father, which is what imposes on us the duty of loving one another and letting our love overflow in service to our neighbors.

2017/05/14 — 5th Sunday of Easter — Year A

The past three Sundays have given us readings from Acts and 1 Peter. Two of the gospels have been from John and one from Luke. The pattern continues, with some changes of scene.


In past weeks, we've been hearing from Peter's speech to the crowd on Pentecost as recounted in Acts 2. This Sunday's first reading — Acts 6:1-7 — takes us forward to the situation in which the first deacons were appointed to ensure fairness in "the daily distribution." In the gospel we will hear Jesus tell us that he is the image of the Father. Here, the deacons become the image of Jesus, who came to serve, not to be served. This passage is an example for us. We too should be images of Jesus, and thus of the Father, by our service to others through performance of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We should also note that it is a well ordered community that enables attracts others to the faith and experiences growth.


The responsorial psalm — verses of Psalm 33, with v. 22 as the refrain — calls us to trust in God, foreshadowing Jesus' exhortation to the disciples to have faith in him.


In the second reading — 1 Peter 2:4-9 — we have a metaphor of stones. Christ is a living stone, and we too are to be living stones built into a "spiritual house," the Church, with Jesus as the foundation. As parts of the Church, we are not inert. Being living stones, we are to be a priesthood, offering sacrifices to God. Of course the most important sacrifice is the one in which we join with the Church as the Church unites with Jesus in offering the sacrifice of Calvary. Beyond that, through Christ we can offer our personal sacrifices to the Father by enduring sufferings and obeying God's will as we understand it.


The gospel — John 14:1-12 — presents a scene at the Last Supper. First,  Jesus promises that he will prepare a place for the disciples (and us) in his Father's house and he will take us there. He tells Thomas that he is the only way to the Father, the truth, and the (eternal) life. He assures Philip that his identification with the Father is so close that to see him is the same as seeing the Father.

Although Jesus is the sole way to the Father, we are told in Matthew 25:31-46 that explicit faith in him is not required. Works of mercy toward his least brothers are sufficient.

The Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father, so that he is the image of the Father. In the same way, the parable of the vine and the branches, John 15:1-10, tells that Jesus is in us and we are in Jesus, which makes us images of him and, by extension, of the Father, which is what imposes on us the duty of loving one another and letting our love overflow in service to our neighbors.

Trinity Sunday — 2016/05/22

There are many references to God as Father throughout the scriptures, and in the New Testament Jesus, in calling God his father indicates that he is God's son, and he speaks of the Holy Spirit whom he and the Father will send. Last Sunday, we celebrated the descent of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul speaks of living in or according to the Spirit. In short, the New Testament is clear that there is God who is Father, that Jesus is his son, and that there is a Holy Spirit. Jesus commands us to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:19.

Several centuries of reflection and theologizing were needed before the 4th Century Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople were able to proclaim the doctrine of the Trinity with precision. They did it in response to a priest of Alexander, Arius, who believed that Jesus was a being inferior to God the Father, a creature. The councils declared that the scripture-witnessed faith of the Church is that Jesus is of the same nature and substance as the Father. In other words, he is fully God. The Holy Spirit is likewise fully God. Over the next thousand years, the liturgical celebration of this belief gradually developed, from the writing of the Roman Missal's preface of the Holy Trinity in the 4th Century, through the composition of a Mass, to the insertion of the Feast into the Church's calendar in 1334. Now, each of the three years of the lectionary cycle has its own assigned readings.


Although the Old Testament gives no explicit teaching that God is a trinity of persons, there are adumbrations, as in today's first reading — Proverbs 8:22-31. There we hear of Wisdom as a person who preexisted the creation of the world, who was present at the creation, who was God's craftsman in creation. God delights in the presence of Wisdom. The beginning of the Gospel of John say, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," and goes on to say that "through him all things were made." John 1:1, 3. So we can identify the Wisdom in this reading with the Word of John's gospel. When today's passage speaks of Wisdom as "poured forth," we can see this as an expression given a systematic precision in the phrases of the creeds, "his only-begotten son," and "born of the Father before all ages, … begotten, not made." And in the conclusion, "playing before God on the surface of the earth; and I found delight in the human race," we can be drawn to consider the ultimate expression of this in the incarnation of the Word of God: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." John 1:14.


The responsorial psalm — Ps. 8:4-9 with refrain from verse 2a — takes up the theme of creation from the first reading and then goes to the theme of the human race from the end of the reading. While humanity may seem small in the vast scale of the universe, God cares for us, and indeed exalts us over the rest of the world. Reading more carefully, we notice the phrase, "the son of man." while this may have been a generic term in the mind of the psalmist, we are led to think of the Son of Man, the incarnate Word of God, the Wisdom of God, who has been exalted at the right hand of the Father as Lord of creation.


The second reading — Romans 5:1-5 — gives us one of the instances in which Paul makes reference to God (the Father) Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Paul doesn't present the precise theology of Nicaea and Constantinople — he's not writing systematic theology, he's dictating letters — but it is through Jesus that we gain access to God by faith and through the Holy Spirit that the love of God is poured into our hearts. It is the action of these three persons that we have the strength to endure the hardships of life.


The gospel — John 16:12-15 — shows us Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a dynamic relationship of cooperation. The Spirit is to guide the disciples to the truth they couldn't bear at the moment Jesus was speaking to them. But he won't be speaking a truth that is his own. He will get it from Jesus, who in turn has it from the Father. The three divine persons work with each other and share everything with each other.


The two councils whose work gave us the Nicene Creed responded to error by defining the truth about the Trinity with precision. But what they said does not fully present the reality of God. It is impossible for finite human minds to fully grasp and express the reality of the infinite God. Beyond that, we may ask what the doctrine of the Trinity means for us. Why is it important. For one thing, it tells us that God is not some impersonal force of the universe. God is relationship within himself, among the three persons not just with us. God is love within himself, among the three persons, not just toward us. God is, in his infinity, what we are to be — to the extent we can be as limited creatures. Created in his likeness, we are created for relationship, we are created for love. We are are not to be isolated, unfeeling, self-absorbed, self-sufficient. We should be in relationships of love with others who share our human nature as the persons of the Trinity are in relationship with one another in their divine nature.

2016/02/28 — 3rd Sunday of Lent — Year C

The first reading — Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15 — tells of God's call of Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses had fled from Egypt, where he had been raised in the royal household, because he feared that his killing of an Egyptian who was striking a Hebrew would become known. He had married Jethro's daughter Zipporah. First  God gets Moses' attention with the miracle of the burning bush that was not consumed by the flames. God identifies himself as the God of the ancestors of the Hebrew people. He is concerned for them and listens to their prayers. On the past couple of Sundays we have heard of God's covenant with Abraham and a synopsis of the history of Abraham's descendants until their arrival in the promised land. Moses will lead them from Egypt to that promised land.

He asks God what his name is because knowing someone's name was thought to create a bond and give some sort of power over him. If Moses can tell the Israelites God's name, it will prove that God is supporting him. God's response has been explained in various ways — I am for you, or it is my nature to exist, or I am self-sufficient and you can't control me. The Hebrew of the name "I am" is transliterated "YHWH," and it is considered so sacred that it is not to be pronounced aloud. Instead, when a it is encountered, the reader says "Adonai," which means "Lord," instead of pronouncing the name. (I've noticed that at least some Jewish people nowadays refer to God with the title "HaShem," which means "the Name.")

God is not only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he is also the God of this people descended from them.


In the responsorial Psalm — Ps 103: 1-4, 6-8, 11 — we meditate on God's mercy and goodness to us. His saving deeds through Moses are an example of his merciful love in action.


The second reading — 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12 — presents the events of the exodus and desert experience of the Israelites as a "type" (prefiguration) of elements of Christianity and draws a moral lesson for the hearers. Passing through the Red Sea is interpreted as prefiguring the Christian's being set free from sin through baptism. But just as the Israelites could be punished when they disobeyed God, baptized Christians need to realize that they don't "have it made:" they need to live holy lives.


In the gospel — Luke 13: 1-9 — Jesus gives a warning which is echoed by Pau in the reading from Corinthians: we need to repent, that is turn away from whatever evil is in our lives and be holy in all we do. He makes it clear that when disaster strikes, it is not God punishing sinners. There are sinners who don't get "punished" in that way. But while God is patient with us, always seeking our conversion and giving us grace to convert — like the gardener with the fig tree — eventually our lives will be over, and if we still haven't turned to God, we will not go to him then. Lent is a time when the call to repentance is especially urgent.

2015/05/10 — 6th Sunday of Easter

The love of God for us, our love for one another, and the action of the Holy Spirit in choosing us are the themes this Sunday.

The gospel (John 15:9-17)* begins with Jesus saying that he loves us in the same way the Father loves him — which is totally. He tells us to remain in his love, which we do by keeping his commandments. In other words, we can separate ourselves from his love by failing to keep his commandments. His commandment is that we love one another as he has loved us — which means that we lay down our lives for one another as he laid down his life for us.

This can seem kind of abstract until we remember that Jesus also said that love of God and love of neighbor are the two greatest commandments, and that all the others depend on those two. In other words, the commandments (honor parents; do not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, or covet) are specific instances of loving one another. And we need to understand those commandments in the way Jesus taught them in the Sermon on the Mount and in other contexts. Turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give to those in need, avoid anger, don't look at others with lust, forgive. In one way or another, the entirety of morality is part of what it means to love.

Jesus goes on to say that our being his disciples comes from his having chosen us rather than our choosing him. Of course, we have to respond to that choice. If we do, the consequence is that we bear fruit, as he puts it metaphorically. That fruit is the loving way of life to which the Sermon on the Mount points.


The second reading (1 John 4:7-10)* makes some of the same points. God loves us before we love him. When we live in love we live in God, and if we don't love we don't know God. God is love, a love that is revealed in Jesus' coming among us so we can have life through him.


While the first reading (Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48) doesn't seem to have much to do with the others, in one sense it exemplifies what they say about God loving us first and choosing us. While the reading has selected verses of chapter 10 of Acts, the full story is all of the chapter. God prompts Cornelius to send for Simon Peter. Peter is given a symbolic vision to teach him that the rules of ritual purity no longer apply, meaning that he is allowed to associate with Gentiles. While Peter is preaching to Cornelius and his family, the Holy Spirit falls on them, as he did on the disciples at Pentecost (which we'll hear about in the first reading on Pentecost, two weeks from now), whereupon Peter orders that they be baptized. It is God who chose them, and, in the person of Peter, the Church recognizes the action of God.

It is important for us to realize that God is free to do what he wants — to choose whomever he wants for whatever graces or works he wants — and that this can go beyond our own limited understanding. We do not control access to God. But God can use us to bring people to knowledge of him, just as he used Peter to bring the inchoate faith of Cornelius to the point where he was able to receive the Holy Spirit. We need to be alert to see what God is doing in our lives: how he is calling us to live out our love for him and one another, how he is enabling us to witness to Jesus as Savior of the world — by our way of life and, when given the chance, by our words.


* It is possible that in some places the second reading and gospel will be those assigned for the Seventh Sunday of Easter — 1 John 4:11-17, a further proclamation of God's love remaining in us; and John 17:11b-19, in which Jesus prays that his disciples will remain in the truth of God's word and be protected from the evil one. Truth and love go together.

The reason for this possibility is that the feast of the Ascension of the Lord can be celebrated on its traditional date, the Thursday 40 days after Easter, or on the following Sunday, which is the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Where the Ascension is celebrated on the Sunday, then that Sunday's second reading and gospel can be read on the Sixth Sunday.

Are You Going to Hell?

First I want to give one good answer to the question so you'll have an idea where this is going. The answer is: not if God can help it.

I'm writing this to summarize a very good talk I heard this evening. The priest who gave the talk grew up in an era when there was a lot of preaching about how terrible hell is and about all the things that would get you sent there. (He told the story of the old Irish priest who was going on about the pains of hell. "There will be the gnashing of teeth," he said; and a little old lady asked, "Father, what about them that have no teeth?" and the priest thundered, "Teeth will be provided.") He, like a lot of others, couldn't take the constant reminders and threats, so at the age of fifteen, he stopped going to church.

In his junior year of college, at a university in Ohio, a new Catholic chaplain (Fr. Brennan Manning) came to campus and started having Mass at midnight every Saturday. Then 20, the speaker decided to check it out. The gospel passage for that Sunday was John 3: 14-21, and Fr. Manning focussed on verses 16 and 17, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."

The chaplain's preaching on that text was very different from what our speaker (and I) had grown up with. We had known of a vindictive God, always on the alert for our sins and ready to send us to hell for them. But here's the truth instead: God's trying to save us, to bring us to heaven. That's because he loves us that much. And what's more he loves us just the way we are at every moment of our lives. He loves us when we're good, and he loves us when we're bad. He loves us when we're sinning; he loves us when we don't love him; and — just like every other lover — he wants us to love him so he can make us part of his life, share his life with us.

Often in the church we seem to think that we have to become good in order to love God, but that's putting the cart before the horse. It's when we love God that we are drawn to be good.

To add my own comment: I think in a number of cases when people reject God, it's not the real God that they reject — the one who loves them so much that he sent his Son to save them — rather they are rightly rejecting a false picture of God as one who seeks to condemn them.

Life Is Beautiful (At least It Was Wednesday Evening)

On Wednesday, it started snowing where I live. I wanted to go to Boston to hear a talk by John Harbison on Bach's "St. Matthew Passion." (I'm going to hear a performance of the work on April 1.) If I get around to it, I might write something about the talk on my music blog. After the talk, which was from 5:00 to about 6:00, I planned to stay in Boston and attend a concert at 8:00 at the Harvard Musical Association.

Because it was snowing rather than raining, I decided not to take an umbrella. You can just brush the snow off when you get where you're going. The snow gradually changed to rain, and it was fairly windy (but not quite enough to blow my hat off). I had a 5-10 minute walk from the subway to the lecture hall, and another back. From the subway to the restaurant was no more than five minutes. Then a good 10 minutes from the restaurant to the HMA. When I got there, the house was dark. It was then that I checked the announcement and found that the concert is next Wednesday. So another ten minute walk back to the subway.

Usually when it's snowing, I walk with my head down and slightly hunched over. But yesterday, I walked fully upright, with my head held high, getting the snow and rain full in my face, and enjoying it.

I've blogged before about feeling good as I walked on a warm fall evening. This time there weren't a lot of other people passing by, but it occurred to me that I was about as joyful to be there as I had been on the earlier occasion. Creation is good, and God is good, and life is beautiful (if unpleasant sometimes).

Of Gods and Men (Not the Movie)

Commenting on my recent post about the surrender of Japan, my friend Nicholas commented, "As long as their emperor doesn't think he's God, I guess..."

That got me thinking: what did it mean for the Emperor and people of Japan to think he was divine. And as  I thought about that, it seemed to me that by "god" they may not have thought of it in the same way we Westerners conceive of God. This in turn led me to recall the work of Eric Voegelin, one of the major 20th Century philosophers of history. In the context of the question about the divinity of the Emperor of Japan, Voegelin's significant insight is that people and cultures can come to differentiate between the immanent (the this-worldly) and the transcendent. Ancient Israel came to this realization, as did the philosophers of ancient Greece. But in many primitive societies, this differentiation went unrecognized.

So when we think of the belief that the Emperor of Japan was a god, we may see this as an example, or a vestige, of undifferentiated thought — the divinity of the Emperor was not conceived of as transcendent, as we think of the God of Abraham, transcending this world, but as something that is part of the world, — as difficult as it is for us Westerners who understand the differentiation between immanent and transcendent to grasp.

The starting point for Voegelin's work seems to have been his revulsion at the twin monstrosities of the 20th Century, National Socialism (Naziism) and Communism. He strove to understand how they could have gained the followings they did and came to see them as forms of Gnosticism, a rejection of the tension of living in the in-between, between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the divine. For many, the tension of living on the edge of nothingness, which awareness of our contingency and the very transcendence of God, which we do not participate in, can be unbearable. The rejection of this tension can express itself as a rejection of the world (such as the Manichæan view of matter as evil). Or it can manifest itself as a rejection of the transcendent, with a concomitant imagining of a secular utopia. The totalitarian ideologies fall into the latter category.


I only became aware of Voegelin in grad school, and it is many years now since I read any of his works in depth. But I recall both being overwhelmed at the range of his knowledge and the profundity of his thought and being disturbed at his notion of the "leap in being" from undifferentiated awareness of the world to differentiation as occurring both in Greek philosophy and in Judæo-Christian revelation. Is Jesus (or Moses) no more than Plato? But Voegelin worked as a philosopher, not as a theologian. In the introduction to the (unfinished) final volume of his great work, Order and History, a letter of his is quoted as follows:

And now to your decisive question: is theory possible only within the framework of Christianity? Quite obviously not. Greek philosophy is pre-Christian, yet one can philosophize perfectly well as a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence; these experiences have, as an historical fact, existed independently of Christianity, and there is no question that today too, it is equally possible to philosophize without Christianity. But this basic and unequivocal answer must be qualified on one essential point. There are degrees of differentiation of experiences. I would take it as a principle of philosophizing that the philosopher must include in his interpretation the maximally differentiated experiences .... Now with Christianity a decisive differentiation has occurred. (In Search of Order, pp.19-20, emphasis added.)

 So a Christian need not regard Voegelin's philosophy of history as relativizing Christianity at the same time as a non-Christian may be able to see it as not compelling him to accept Christianity. But I haven't yet read volumes 4 and 5 of Order and History. Maybe there is something in them which goes beyond the quote above.

Finally, I'd note that certain forms of fundamentalism and legalism within Christianity may also be forms of the spiritual sickness which has, in other souls, given rise to Naziism and Communism. That is, they may also be ways in which people uncomfortable with the immanent-transcendent tension — and the implicit precariousness of our grasp on being — attempt to give themselves security in place of the reality of faith as "the realization of what is hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1, emphasis added.)

"Every Saint has a past, Every Sinner has a future"

I found a laminated card with those lines in the back of a church in Monaghan Town, Co. Monaghan, Ireland, when I was there in September. It goes on to say,
"My past life I leave to Your Mercy, O God.
My present life I give to Your Love.
My future life I place in Your Providence."

Gay Teen Suicide: A Catholic Response

Here is a link to a post by a Franciscan priest on his blog. You will note that he is reprinting something written by a Jesuit priest. So this comes with the backing of two priests. And Father Martin's comment that
"The Christian community must find a way to reach out more compassionately to gay and lesbian youths, help them feel welcome and valued, and help them know that they are beloved by God -- and by us. We must lead, as we do with any group, and as Jesus did, first with welcome, not condemnation."
is perfectly consistent with what I say in my "First Things First" comment at the top of my left column.

One of my constant efforts in this blog and especially in my comments is to make this point and to call attention to the two official statements I have linked in my "Resources." The first is the U.S. Bishops' statement, "Always Our Children," addressed to all Catholics, and especially to parents of gays. In it they say

"Our message speaks of accepting yourself, your beliefs and values, your questions, and all you may be struggling with at this moment; accepting and loving your child as a gift of God; and accepting the full truth of God's revelation about the dignity of the human person and the meaning of human sexuality. Within the Catholic moral vision there is no contradiction among these levels of acceptance, for truth and love are not opposed. They are inseparably joined and rooted in one person, Jesus Christ, who reveals God to be ultimate truth and saving love.





Accepting Your Child
How can you best express your love—itself a reflection of God's unconditional love—for your child? At least two things are necessary.


…
First, don't break off contact; don't reject your child. A shocking number of homosexual youth end up on the streets because of rejection by their families. This, and other external pressures, can place young people at a greater risk for self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse and suicide.




Your child may need you and the family now more than ever. He or she is still the same person. This child, who has always been God's gift to you, may now be the cause of another gift: your family becoming more honest, respectful, and supportive. Yes, your love can be tested by this reality, but it can also grow stronger through your struggle to respond lovingly.




The second way to communicate love is to seek appropriate help for your child and for yourself.


…
You can help a homosexual person in two general ways. First, encourage him or her to cooperate with God's grace to live a chaste life. Second, concentrate on the person, not on the homosexual orientation itself. This implies respecting a person's freedom to choose or refuse therapy directed toward changing a homosexual orientation. Given the present state of medical and psychological knowledge, there is no guarantee that such therapy will succeed. Thus, there may be no obligation to undertake it, though some may find it helpful.


…


God does not love someone any less simply because he or she is homosexual. God's love is always and everywhere offered to those who are open to receiving it. St. Paul's words offer great hope:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39)

…
Every person has an inherent dignity because he or she is created in God's image."





The other is from the Vatican, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986, when Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI was its head. The title is "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons." With the approval of Pope John Paul II, they wrote

It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

…

We encourage the Bishops, then, to provide pastoral care in full accord with the teaching of the Church for homosexual persons of their dioceses.

…

An authentic pastoral programme will assist homosexual persons at all levels of the spiritual life: through the sacraments, and in particular through the frequent and sincere use of the sacrament of Reconciliation, through prayer, witness, counsel and individual care. In such a way, the entire Christian community can come to recognize its own call to assist its brothers and sisters, without deluding them or isolating them.

…

Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a "heterosexual" or a "homosexual" and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.

" It is clear to me from this that the Church does not hate or exclude homosexuals. But as with much of our teaching, the problem is one of communicating it in its fullness. The Church's teaching about the morality of homosexual conduct is pretty clear to most people. But that is only the third stage of our dealing with gay people. All too many people, gay and straight, Catholics and others, make the mistake of extrapolating from that and assuming that it means that the Church "hates" or "excludes" LGBT. So we've got to do a better job of getting the first part of the message out, as these documents try to state it. I hope this has clarified things for you, who have done me the favor of reading it.

September 21, 2009: St. Matthew & Welcome — Secretly Gay

I don't want to bury either of these items, so this post's a twofer.

Secretly Gay is my newest follower. His blog is called A Secretly Gay Teen Boy Blog. He lives in England, describes himself as working class, and writes about things that are going on in his life and his hopes for self-improvement. Maybe you can offer some good advice. Maybe you'll just like hearing about what he's doing. Why not check out the blog?

Glad you've decided to follow, Secretly Gay. I hope you find it worthwhile.

Today is the Feast of St. Matthew, the tax collector who answered the call to become one of the 12 apostles. One of the four gospels in the Bible bears his name. His profession of tax collector for the Romans meant that he was despised by his fellow Jews as a collaborator. Furthermore, it was a job which gave copious opportunities for extortion and fraud. So when Jesus and his disciples were joined by a large group of tax collectors and sinners for dinner the pharisees didn't like it. Table fellowship implied a considerable degree of closeness, and they thought that good people should have nothing to do with sinners. When they questioned Jesus' disciples about how he could do that, Jesus replied, "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' I did not come to call the righteous but sinners." Matthew 9:11-13

Because I worked for the IRS, I consider Matthew to be one of my patron saints. But more generally, I think we can realize both from the fact that Jesus chose him and from the reply to the pharisees that God does not reject people. If we realize that we have been doing things that are wrong, that doesn't mean that we can't get back to God. God still wants us and he'll help us to do better if we let him. 

Holy Week — What God Wants

On March 30, I received the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession or Penance as it used to be called). After I had confessed the sins I needed to, the priest said, "God doesn't want your good works. God wants you." He went on to explain what he meant and I can't reproduce it precisely, but the basic point is that it is us he wants to have with him. Our works are passing things, but we are not. Dean Grey, of Exploding Doughnut, told on his blog of coming on the Chicago Children's Choir rehearsing in a room in the Chicago Cultural Center. They sang a gospel hymn with a refrain which included the words, "I love you. I need you to survive." Maybe that's supposed to be us talking to God. But it is also how God feels about us.

It has been a commonplace point in Lenten preaching to say that our sins are what put Jesus on the cross. The priest I went to made that point with respect to my sins. Then he went on to say, "and Jesus says it's okay." God wants me, and if Jesus needs to go to the cross so he can have me, it's okay. God loves me, and you, and needs us to survive. So he'll pay any price to have us. So it's okay that we put Jesus on the cross. The priest had said in a talk he had just given, that as Good Friday and Easter approach, we should ask ourselves, do we believe what God says. Do we trust his love?

So that's what I hope you'll be thinking about as this week unfolds. Is there a God whose love for you is so great that it's okay that Jesus died, if only he can have you? Do you trust God? Do you trust his love? Will you let him have you?

A Forwarded E-mail

Somebody I know irl forwarded this to me.

Tommy's Story

Father John Powell, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, writes about a student in his Theology of Faith class named Tommy:

Some twelve years ago, I stood watching my university students, file into the classroom for our first session in the Theology of Faith.

That was the day I first saw Tommy. My eyes and my mind both blinked. He was combing his long flaxen hair, which hung six inches below his shoulders.
It was the first time I had ever seen a boy with hair that long. I guess it was just coming into fashion then. I know in my mind that it isn't what's on your head but what's in it that counts; but on that day I was unprepared and my emotions flipped. I immediately filed Tommy under "S" for strange... Very strange.

Tommy turned out to be the "atheist in residence" in my Theology of Faith course. He constantly objected to, smirked at, or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving Father/God. We lived with each other in relative peace for one semester, although I admit he was for me at times a serious pain in the back pew.

When he came up at the end of the course to turn in his final exam, he asked in a cynical tone, "Do you think I'll ever find God?"

I decided instantly on a little shock therapy. "No!" I said very emphatically.

"Why not," he responded, "I thought that was the product you were pushing."

I let him get five steps from the classroom door and then called out, "Tommy! I don't think you'll ever find Him, but I am absolutely certain that He will find you!" He shrugged a little and left my class and my life.

I felt slightly disappointed at the thought that he had missed my clever line -- He will find you! At least I thought it was clever.

Later I heard that Tommy had graduated, and I was duly grateful.

Then a sad report came. I heard that Tommy had terminal cancer. Before I could search him out, he came to see me. When he walked into my office, his body was very badly wasted and the long hair had all fallen out as a result of chemotherapy. But his eyes were bright and his voice was firm, for the first time, I believe. "Tommy, I've thought about you so often; I hear you are sick," I blurted out.

"Oh, yes, very sick. I have cancer in both lungs. It's a matter of weeks."

"Can you talk about it, Tom?" I asked.

"Sure, what would you like to know?" he replied

"What's it like to be only twenty-four and dying?

"Well, it could be worse.

"Like what?

"Well, like being fifty and having no values or ideals, like being fifty and thinking that booze, seducing women, and making money are the real biggies in life..

I began to look through my mental file cabinet under "S" where I had filed Tommy as strange. (It seems as though everybody I try to reject by classification, God sends back into my life to educate me.)

"But what I really came to see you about," Tom said, "is something you said to me on the last day of class." (He remembered!) He continued, "I asked you if you thought I would ever find God and you said, 'No!' which surprised me Then you said, 'But He will find you.' I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was hardly intense at that time.

(My clever line. He thought about that a lot!)

"But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, that's when I got serious about locating God.. And when the malignancy spread into my vital organs, I really began banging bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven. But God did not come out. In fact, nothing happened. Did you ever try anything for a long time with great effort and with no success? You get psychologically glutted, fed up with trying. And then you quit

"Well, one day I woke up, and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may be or may not be there, I just quit. I decided that I didn't really care about God, about an after life, or anything like that. I decided to spend what time I had left
doing something more profitable. I thought about you and your class and I remembered something else you had said: 'The essential sadness is to go through life without loving. But it would be almost equally sad to go through life and leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you had loved them.'"

"So, I began with the hardest one, my Dad. He was reading the newspaper when I approached him. "Dad.


"Yes, what?" he asked without lowering the newspaper.

"Dad, I would like to talk with you."

"Well, talk.

"I mean. It's really important."

The newspaper came down three slow inches. "What is it?"

"Dad, I love you, I just wanted you to know that." Tom smiled at me and said it with obvious satisfaction, as though he felt a warm and secret joy flowing inside of him. "The newspaper fluttered to the floor. Then my father did two things I could never remember him ever doing before. He cried and he hugged me. We talked all night, even though he had to go to work the next morning. It felt so good to be close to my father, to see his tears, to feel his hug, to hear him say that he loved me."

"It was easier with my mother and little brother. They cried with me, too, and we hugged each other, and started saying real nice things to each other. We shared the things we had been keeping secret for so many years.

"I was only sorry about one thing --- that I had waited so long. Here I was, just beginning to open up to all the people I had actually been close to.

"Then, one day I turned around and God was there. He didn't come to me when I pleaded with Him. I guess I was like an animal trainer holding out a hoop, 'C'mon, jump through. C'mon, I'll give you three days, three weeks.'"

"Apparently God does things in His own way and at His own hour. But the important thing is that He was there. He found me! You were right. He found me even after I stopped looking for Him."

"Tommy," I practically gasped, "I think you are saying something very important and much more universal than you realize. To me, at least, you are saying that the surest way to find God is not to make Him a private possession, a problem solver, or an instant consolation in time of need, but rather by opening to love. You know, the Apostle John said: 'God is love, and anyone who lives in love is living with God and God is living in him.' Tom, could I ask you a favor? You know, when I had you in class you were a real pain. But (laughingly) you can make it all up to me now.. Would you come into my present Theology of Faith course and tell them what you have just told me? If I told them the same thing it wouldn't be half as effective as if you were to tell it.

"Oooh.. I was ready for you, but I don't know if I'm ready for your class."

"Tom, think about it. If and when you are ready, give me a call."

In a few days Tom called, said he was ready for the class, that he wanted to do that for God and for me. So we scheduled a date.

However, he never made it. He had another appointment, far more important than the one with me and my class. Of course, his life was not really ended by his death, only changed. He made the great step from faith into vision. He found a life far more beautiful than the eye of man has ever seen or the ear of man has ever heard or the mind of man has ever imagined.

Before he died, we talked one last time.

"I'm not going to make it to your class," he said.

"I know, Tom."

"Will you tell them for me? Will you ... tell the whole world for me?"

I will, Tom. I'll tell them. I'll do my best."

So, to all of you who have been kind enough to read this simple story about God's love, thank you for listening. And to you, Tommy, somewhere in the sunlit, verdant hills of heaven --- I told them, Tommy, as best I could.

If this story means anything to you, please pass it on to a friend or two. It is a true story and is not enhanced for publicity purposes.


With thanks, Rev. John Powell, Professor, Loyola University, Chicago

I decided to check up on this and googled the university and searched for his name. He was on a 2001 list of faculty as a professor emeritus of theology, first appointed in 1960. He is no longer listed on the faculty. So I think this is for real, but probably written more than 20 years ago. Anyway, here it is fwiw.

Belief and Orientation: Reconciling the Contradiction II.

My homosexual orientation is something I consider a given. I don't profess to know exactly how it came to be. I have described here when it first manifested itself explicitly in my life at age 12 and how I came to realize what it was at age 16. I made unsuccessful attempts to change it, but eventually concluded that it was so strongly established that further attempts at change would be wasted effort.

Since I think God created sex as a way for us to be an image of his creative love, I find entirely reasonable the teaching of the Catholic Church that my same-sex attraction goes in a direction inconsistent with the meaning of sex. In the word the Church uses, my sexual appetite is disordered. Not my fault: I didn't choose it. Not God's fault any more than any other disorder in the world: he permits it, but I don't think he miraculously intervenes at our conception or some later time to say, "Zap, you're gay." Not anybody else's fault, because nobody else intended it either.

But if God loves me, am I not as much entitled to the joy and the pleasure of sexual activity as any heterosexual person? In a word, no. I have to go back and give some more of my beliefs. I believe that God's love for us is shown most clearly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that if there was ever a possibility for perfect happiness on this earth, sin destroyed it, and all of us have to put up with some elements of pain, suffering, and sorrow in our lives. Some people get dread diseases, some people lose loved ones to death at times or in circumstances that are especially painful, some people are homosexual. I believe that Jesus calls me and all his followers to take up our cross daily, that is to accept the suffering and sorrow which we cannot overcome, and that somehow it gets joined to what he did to restore to us the everlasting joy beyond this life which is God's plan for us.

In other words, I don't think God is obligated to give any of us happiness in this life. I think we should be profoundly grateful in the first place simply for our existence, and then for whatever happiness we do experience on this earth.  I look forward to eternal joy.

I can see that I may have missed out on a lot of happiness because I have chosen to act in accordance with my beliefs. To do otherwise, I would have had to change my beliefs (not easy to do), or to try to tell myself that I had changed my beliefs when I hadn't, or to behave contrary to my beliefs. But I also think that I had problems other than my choice to be celibate, and that those problems also contributed in considerable degree to my loneliness through much of my life. I really believe that with support, such as that offered by Courage, which did not exist when I was growing up, and with counseling and therapy if necessary, it is possible for a homosexual person to find emotional intimacy and true happiness in a loving "Platonic" friendship or friendships.

So how do I explain myself? I see no reason to believe that I am entitled to sexual fulfillment. I see myself as one whom God loves infinitely and unconditionally. I see my homosexuality as merely one instance of the mystery of why God lets pain, sorrow, and struggle exist. I cannot explain the mystery, but I cannot let that mystery drive me away from God. It's a matter of accepting creation as I see it. I live my life in the joy of God's love and in the sorrow of an imperfect world and in the hope of a life extending beyond this earthly existence where the pain of this existence is vastly outweighed and makes it all worth it.

I hope this answers the anonymous commenters question. I hope it doesn't sound too preachy, but how else can I say what I believe when it happens to be what my church teaches? How can I leave my beliefs out of it? I hope it tells other readers why I choose not to engage in conduct which they think is not at all wrong.

Belief and Orientation: Reconciling the Contradiction I.

An anonymous commenter asks, "How do gay people with strong religious beliefs explain themselves to one who sees this as an impossible contradiction?"

I hope most of what I post here has some connection to that question, but I'll try to say something directly responsive to the question as I understand it. And I take it the contradiction in question is between the strong religious beliefs and being gay. For starters, it seems to me that there are three different things in play here. There is my orientation. There are my beliefs. And there is my conduct.

I think that my beliefs are dependent on faith, which in turn I consider a gift from God. In other words, it is not something that is demonstrable in the way a mathematical proposition or a logical syllogism is. It is possible to say that I find none of it absolutely self-contradictory, and that a lot of it seems to me to make sense. But I have no illusion (as I once did) that I can prove it in such a way that any honest person would be compelled to accept that everything I believe is true. So it's about faith, and you've got it or you don't. I don't mean to be cavalier, just to say that my beliefs are based on a faith which tells me many things which you may not agree with if you don't start from the same or similar faith. So first I will say some of what I believe, not to tell you what you must believe, but to tell you about myself.

I believe that the world was created by God out of love and that God loves all of us and wishes to share his joy with us in a life which extends beyond the limits of our earthly existence. I believe that God has let us come to know of his love for us and how we can live now and forever in his love. I believe that we can use our intelligence to help us understand what he has revealed. I believe that the Bible shows us God progressively revealing himself to human beings in ways adapted to their ability to comprehend. I believe that all morality is not arbitrary but what God, in his love knows is best for us.

More specifically, I believe that human sexuality is part of God's loving creation. I believe that God created sex to enable us to be a physical image of his loving act of creation, and in doing so to experience a taste of his joy. I believe that engaging in sex in a way which precludes the procreation of new human life falls short of what God gave it to us for. But since homosexual activity cannot procreate, I believe it is one way in which we can fall short of what God gave the gift for (and, btw, "falling short" is the meaning of the Greek word which is usually translated "sin" in our Bibles).

I also believe that God gave us the Bible as his word in human language, and that the Church has been given God's help so it can correctly interpret God's word to us. So I did not make up my beliefs on my own but found them in the teachings of my church, and found them credible.

This is getting kind of long. I'll give another post or two to deal with orientation and conduct.

The Warm Sacred Night, Part 3: Praying

I left the restaurant and stepped into moist air, just beginning to form fog, in the mid-fifties Fahrenheit (about 12-13 C), and calm. It felt warm for the season. As I began walking to the HMA for the concert, I also began to pray silently, in my heart. I thanked God for "Seth" and for being able to share the passage from the book with him. I prayed that it would help him on his journey to God. I prayed that God would bless him with a good life and eventually lead him home to himself. I prayed for all the other waiters and others in my life whom I have ever found attractive, that they would all be with God in heaven and know of and be grateful for my prayers for them, even if I were to end up in hell.

I thanked God for the beauty of the warm sacred night. People began to pass me going in the opposite direction — young couples, bunches of young guys — and I loved them and asked God to bless them also. I thanked God again for all the people I have loved and all those to whom I have been attracted and asked that I might be in heaven with them, where my love would be entirely pure, redeemed from any sinful lust.

I walked on, carefully because the moisture and the fallen leaves made the brick sidewalks slippery, and my heart was full of joy.

"I felt every teardrop"

Today in church, after Communion, the choir sang a meditation hymn titled "For Those Tears I Died." If you read the verses, it seems like an "altar call." But the refrain by itself speaks of God's love in a way I found very moving. It goes

And Jesus said, "Come to the water, stand by my side;

I know you are thirsty, you won't be denied.

I felt every teardrop when in darkness you cried,

And I strove to remind you that for those tears I died."

As I sat there in church listening to this, I thought of Joshua and what he has just gone through and continues to go through with his parents, of all the others who have had to undergo similar sorrows because of who they are, and the thought of the teardrops they cry in the darkness brought teardrops to my own eyes. I had to look up at the ceiling to avoid breaking down — looking at actual flesh and blood people was making it just too intense.

This is what I want everybody who struggles or is in pain because of a homosexual orientation or the reactions of other people to it to realize. There is a God who understands how you feel and weeps with you. God also weeps at the hard-heartedness of those who hate you and bring you to tears.

Many people in the church become so fixated on homosexuality that they forget that God loves everybody. They become so fixated on their belief that homosexual activity is sinful that they forget that there are many ways heterosexuals can sin. And they seem to forget that there are many kinds of sins that have nothing to do with sex. If we preach a certain sexual morality, we must always try to keep a sense of proportion about it, and above all we must try to remember and emulate God's love and compassion. He feels every teardrop when in darkness you cry.