Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 21:28-32

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people: “What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ The son said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. The man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did his father’s will?” They answered, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you. When John came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him; but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: Not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven but only the one who does the will of my Father.” It is not sufficient to simply do pious devotions and study the scriptures and theology. The gospel demands mission: kind acts, generous deeds, availability. The gospel beckons us to be balm for the wounded world.

Saint of the day: Born in 1819 in Aachen, Germany, Mary Frances Schervier once wanted to become a Trappistine nun but instead was led by God to establish a community of sisters who care for the sick and aged in the United States and throughout the world.

Born into a distinguished family in Aachen (then ruled by Prussia but formerly Aix-la-Chapelle, France), Frances ran the household after her mother’s death and established a reputation for generosity to the poor. In 1844 she became a Secular Franciscan. The next year she and four companions established a religious community devoted to caring for the poor. In 1851 the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis (a variant of the original name) were approved by the local bishop; the community soon spread. The first U.S. foundation was made in 1858.

Mother Frances visited the United States in 1863 and helped her sisters nurse soldiers wounded in the Civil War. She visited the United States again in 1868. When Philip Hoever was establishing the Brothers of the Poor of St. Francis, she encouraged him.

When Mother Frances died in 1876 at the age of 57 in the city of her birth, there were 2,500 members of her community worldwide. The number has kept growing. They are still engaged in operating hospitals and homes for the aged.

Spiritual reading: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.” (Abba Joseph of Panephysis)

Fr. Ron’s Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year C

How do you express your joy? Do you clap your hands, laugh loudly, scream out, react to someone nearby with a face or gesture? In our Gospel today the infant John “leaped for joy.” To someone with a body image that is not good – such as I have had throughout my life – jumping for joy is NOT the way I would describe my reaction to happiness. To me, it seems a person who would jump for joy is a physical person, someone comfortable with his or her own body. But this was in a womb. John, in his mother’s womb expressed both an emotional and physical reaction, according to Luke.

Even though Luke is being very imaginative here, we always tend to ascribe what happens to some emotional reaction in babies. I am told that babies don’t laugh till they are a few months old – before that it is just gas. But we like to think they are laughing at us, and happy. Similarly Elizabeth experienced a jump in her womb and Luke ascribes it to John’s recognition of Jesus. Pretty far-fetched, but it captures beautifully the emotion and feeling of that meeting between the two pregnant women.

Luke provides the richest account of the pregnancy of Mary and the birth of Christ. In the twenty to thirty years after Mark’s Gospel which hadn’t mentioned anything about Christ until he was an adult, Luke combined or imagined many details to create the infancy account. If you have read the four Gospels, you know that they contain very different stories in the details about Christ’s birth. This is because they wanted to stress different things about Jesus and wanted to relate Jesus to Old Testament stories and traditions. Luke was no different. He read in the Torah, in Micah, as we do in the first reading today, that the savior would come from Bethlehem, so Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem. Whether that is an historical fact or not is beside the point. If he is the Savior then he fulfilled the Old Law and so the authors create details to point that out.

In the Gospel today Luke is setting up the eventual encounter between Jesus and John the Baptist. He may have been bothered by the fact that in Mark’s account Jesus got baptized and that might mean to some people that he had sin. By Luke’s time, the theological understanding of Christ was that he was sinless. So even in this early narrative Luke is setting us and the early Christians up to understand that John was a precursor of Christ, a prophet of Christ and was baptizing, as we saw last week, not for the remission of sins, but for repentance. It was only Jesus who could forgive sin.

In any case, we have a beautiful story told to us today. It is a little out of context so let’s bring back the context. We first meet Zechariah and Elizabeth, an old couple, who are childless. The angel Gabriel comes to Zechariah and tells him that he is going to have a son, but Zechariah refuses to believe it and loses his voice because of his disbelief until the son was born. Elizabeth gets pregnant and is thrilled because she saw her childlessness as a curse, but she decides to keep the pregnancy secret.

Mary, meanwhile, has her own secret. She has been told by an angel that she will conceive and bear a son, even though she is not married. She is told that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and she will conceive, making Jesus the actual Son of God – again a declaration of the theology which had early developed in the Church.

We begin then today with the meeting of the two pregnant women. They did not know that each other was pregnant. But when they meet, the Holy Spirit comes upon Elizabeth as was foretold, and John leaps for joy, the Spirit letting Elizabeth know that Mary is also pregnant in a very special manner. “Blessed are you among women and blest is the fruit of your womb.” Elizabeth was the first to speak the words which so many of us recite every day. We stop our reading at this point just before the incredibly beautiful prayer of Mary that we call the Magnificat.

We call the story we read today “The Visitation.” The word most used in this story is the word “blessed” assigned to Mary three times. Many non-Catholics criticize us as worshiping Mary almost as a goddess, but the real reason she is universally admired and prayed to in the Catholic church is explained in this reading. Mary is blessed because she was the vessel that bore our savior, blessed because she had the faith enough to agree to God’s very strange and frightening happening to her, and not because she was or did anything in herself. She is honored because she is the mother of Christ and thus God.

In Luke, all of the movement is toward the future. The events of our redemption all really begin at the meeting of John and Jesus in the desert and so this early history is just setting us up for that event. Both women in the Gospel offered their bodies for God’s purpose. This is what ties the Gospel reading to the second reading today because just as Mary and Elizabeth offered their bodies, so did Jesus. Jesus, too, offered his body up for our salvation. We read in the Epistle to the Hebrews: Behold, I come to do your will. ”By this “will,” we have been consecrated through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. To be blessed and to be consecrated have the same meaning. Through the body of Christ we ourselves have been blessed, just as Mary has been blessed, and we too are able to carry the body of Christ within us. The Incarnation can take place within us each time we go to communion.

In Advent we have been preparing ourselves to accept this Incarnation in us again.

As the daylight became shorter in the last few months we were more and more in darkness, but starting today on this last Sunday of Advent, the daylight gets longer each day. How appropriate! Where is the darkness within us that needs light? Do we find ourselves jealous of others, do we have strong moments of anger or impatience? Are we blind to the feelings of others? We work in Advent to bring light to those places inside us so that we can let the Incarnation take place in us on Christmas Day. We need to be like Elizabeth and Mary and say ‘yes’ to his coming. We need to wait – the birth of a child takes a set amount of time, the people of Israel waited for a savior for a period of time. For the men here today, we need to imitate the courage of women in preparing ourselves for this child – how demanding a child can be on one’s ego, one’s privacy, and one’s plans for the future. It is even painful at times. Hopefully, if we have waited and prepared ourselves well, if we have let the light in, something inside us will also leap for joy this Christmas, and we can celebrate the coming of our Savior 2009 with the same innocence and joy that Luke describes in his Good News today. And so, this is the Good News I also bring you today – Christ is coming. Let us ready ourselves through the Spirit to receive him.

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 21:23-27

When Jesus had come into the temple area, the chief priests and the elders of the people approached him as he was teaching and said, “By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?” Jesus said to them in reply, “I shall ask you one question, and if you answer it for me, then I shall tell you by what authority I do these things. Where was John’s baptism from? Was it of heavenly or of human origin?” They discussed this among themselves and said, “If we say ‘Of heavenly origin,’ he will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a prophet.” So they said to Jesus in reply, “We do not know.” He himself said to them, “Neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: In this passage we receive today, the chief priests and the elders of the people are in a manipulative conundrum of their own making. They ask Jesus by what authority he acts, but because the leaders are too caught in their own cunning machinations to speak the truth, Jesus declines to reveal the truth to them. It is to simple hearts that God reveals God’s truth. And so it is that each of us should pray that we may pray with Jesus, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”

Saint of the day: John is a saint because his life was a heroic effort to live up to his name: “of the Cross.” The folly of the cross came to full realization in time. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34b) is the story of John’s life. The Paschal Mystery—through death to life—strongly marks John as reformer, mystic-poet and theologian-priest.

Ordained a Carmelite priest at 25 in 1567, John met Teresa of Avila and like her vowed himself to the primitive Rule of the Carmelites. As partner with Teresa and in his own right, John engaged in the work of reform, and came to experience the price of reform: increasing opposition, misunderstanding, persecution, imprisonment. He came to know the cross acutely—to experience the dying of Jesus—as he sat month after month in his dark, damp, narrow cell with only his God!

Yet, the paradox! In this dying of imprisonment John came to life, uttering poetry. In the darkness of the dungeon, John’s spirit came into the Light. There are many mystics, many poets; John is unique as mystic-poet, expressing in his prison-cross the ecstasy of mystical union with God in the Spiritual Canticle.

But as agony leads to ecstasy, so John had his Ascent to Mt. Carmel, as he named it in his prose masterpiece. As man-Christian-Carmelite, he experienced in himself this purifying ascent; as spiritual director, he sensed it in others; as psychologist-theologian, he described and analyzed it in his prose writings. His prose works are outstanding in underscoring the cost of discipleship, the path of union with God: rigorous discipline, abandonment, purification. Uniquely and strongly John underlines the gospel paradox: The cross leads to resurrection, agony to ecstasy, darkness to light, abandonment to possession, denial to self to union with God. If you want to save your life, you must lose it. John is truly “of the Cross.” He died at 49—a life short, but full.

Spiritual reading: In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing. (John of the Cross)

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 3:10-18

The crowds asked John the Baptist, “What should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”

Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ. John answered them all, saying, “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Exhorting them in many other ways, he preached good news to the people.

Reflection on the gospel reading: The gospel passage today addresses the coming of the messiah as John the Baptist goes about his task of preparing for the Lord’s arrival. John is clear that he is not the messiah. He also is unwavering in his proclamation of what is necessary to prepare a place for the messiah: we are to give some of our bread to the hungry and some of our clothes to the naked; we are to not to take more than what is just; and we are to conform ourselves in acceptance to the station we occupy in life. This gospel placed squarely in the midst of Advent reminds us that just as John announced Jesus’ arrival, we baptized all are called by God to prepare for Jesus’ coming by lives lived in mercy, justice, and gratitude.

Spiritual reading: He kindles our understanding, he prepares our ways, he eases our conscience, he comforts our soul, he lightens our heart, and gives us, in part, a knowing and loving in his blessed, blissful godhead, with the gracious mentality of his sweet manhood and his blessed passion, and with a courteous marveling at his noble, surpassing goodness. He makes us love all that he loves for his love, and be well satisfied with him and with all his works (Revelations of Divine Love by Dame Juliana of Norwich)

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Luke 1:39-47

Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” And Mary said, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: I have written before that when I was a younger man, I lived for a time as a Jesuit. During my novitiate, I worked for a number of weeks in an orphanage in Mexico. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe came while I was there, and in the celebration of it, I traveled to Tijuana to participate in a nighttime parade in honor of the Guadalupana. A vast throng of countless thousands surrounded me as we sang hymns in honor of the Lady of Tepeyac. The night was cold as we walked, carrying our torches. What indeed is a miracle? What can we say about an image that led to the conversion of eight million people in the space of 10 short years? What can we say about an image burnt into the imagination of a whole nation? What can we say about an image that caused those thousands to walk that night in honor of the Lady and continue to walk through my mind, etched as they are in my own memory, these 30 years later? What indeed is a miracle?

Saint of the day: The feast in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe goes back to the sixteenth century. Chronicles of that period tell us the story.

A poor Indian named Cuauhtlatohuac was baptized and given the name Juan Diego. He was a 57-year-old widower and lived in a small village near Mexico City. On Saturday morning, December 9, 1531, he was on his way to a nearby barrio to attend Mass in honor of Our Lady.

He was walking by a hill called Tepeyac when he heard beautiful music like the warbling of birds. A radiant cloud appeared and within it a young Native American maiden dressed like an Aztec princess. The lady spoke to him in his own language and sent him to the bishop of Mexico, a Franciscan named Juan de Zumarraga. The bishop was to build a chapel in the place where the lady appeared.

Eventually the bishop told Juan Diego to have the lady give him a sign. About this same time Juan Diego’s uncle became seriously ill. This led poor Diego to try to avoid the lady. The lady found Diego, nevertheless, assured him that his uncle would recover and provided roses for Juan to carry to the bishop in his cape or tilma.

When Juan Diego opened his tilma in the bishop’s presence, the roses fell to the ground and the bishop sank to his knees. On Juan Diego’s tilma appeared an image of Mary exactly as she had appeared at the hill of Tepeyac. It was December 12, 1531.

Spiritual reading: O all-desirable love . . . worthy of praise is the one who pursues you; even more praiseworthy is the one who has found you; more blessed the one who is loved by you, received by you, taught by you, the one who dwells in you and is fed by you with Christ, the immortal food, Christ our God! (The Discourses by Saint Symeon the New Theologian)

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 11:16-19

Jesus said to the crowds: “To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: God speaks to us in the facts of our lives. God moves among the events in our existence to fashion a story. The question is not whether God is speaking to us; the question is whether we are listening to God. In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us that God worked through John in fasting and abstinence, and the people misunderstood God’s message. Similarly, God worked through Jesus through his table fellowship, and the people again misunderstood God’s message. Creating a quiet space in our lives that allows us to understand how God is speaking to us is a difficult task, but it is impossible if we don’t actually set aside some fixed sacred moments for God’s voice to be heard. Advent is the perfect moment to create space to hear God’s voice. So let us begin anew today.

Saint of the day: Born November 4, 1891 in Madrid, Spain, María Maravillas De Jesús was the daughter of Luis Pidal y Mon and Cristina Chico de Guzman y Munoz, the Marquess and Marchioness of Pidal; her father was Spanish ambassador to the Vatican and a very active supporter of the Church. She was baptized at the age of eight days, confirmed in 1896, and made her first Communion in 1902. She grew up in a pious family and was known as an intelligent and religious child. She early perceived a call to religious life and entered the Carmelite novitiate at El Escorial, Madrid in 1920.

On May 19, 1924, Maria and three sisters founded a house at Cerro de los Angeles, Madrid, the geographical center of Spain, and she took her final vows there on May 30, 1924. Prioress of the house in 1926, it expanded so quickly that Mother Marvillas was sent to found another in Kottayam, India, which over the years has expanded to many other Carmels in that country. She returned to Spain, and in 1936, as part of the anti-clerical actions of the Spanish Civil War, she and her sisters were arrested, relocated to Madrid, and subjected to fourteen months of house arrest and harassment. In September 1937, Mother Maravillas and her community relocated to las Batuecas, Salamanca where they founded a new house.

In 1939, she led a group of sisters to restore the house at Cerro de los Angeles. From there she led an expansion of the Carmelites with houses in Mancera de Abajo, Salamanca in 1944; Duruelo, Avíla in 1947; Cabrera, Salamanca 1950; Arenas de San Pedro, Avíla in 1954; San Calixto, Córdoba in 1956; Aravaca, Madrid in 1958; Talavera de la Reina, Toledo around.1960; la Aldeheula, Madrid in 1961; and Montemar-Torremolinos, Málaga in 1964. To unite these and other far-flung houses, she founded the Association of Saint Teresa in 1972. The Carmel in la Aldeheula was hugely expanded with schools, a community of houses for the local poor, church, community halls and other structures in what effectively became a small town.

In all these works Mother Maravillas was known for her dedication for work and prayer, her humility and care of her younger sisters, and her dedication to the Rules and spirituality of the Discalced Carmelites. She died of natural causes on December 11, 1974 in La Aldehuela monastery, Madrid province, Spain.

Spiritual reading: The message of hope the contemplative offers you is that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit. (Letter to Dom Francis Decroix by Thomas Merton, August 21, 1967)

A Time to Mourn. . . .

About two weeks ago, Joshua, the 8-week old infant son of my grandniece and her husband, was found dead in his bed early in the morning. The Medical Examiner has ruled the cause as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS); which, according to some in the medical/legal community, essentially means that there is no discernible cause. As you might imagine, Joshua’s parents have been devastated. His parents and I had been planning his Baptism and he was the delight of their young lives. I’ve done funerals for children in the past, but this was a particularly-difficult one for me. Now, we are beginning to help each other heal and look forward–but not too quickly, I hope.

People around the couple are already urging them to “try again,” to look to the future and not cling to the past and all of its “what if’s.” But I’ve attempted to offer a note of caution, not only because I think it takes time to find healing, but also because I believe there’s a place for sadness, for grief–for crying, if you will–that is essential if we’re to be reconciled in a healthy way to a changed situation. And mourning is good, in and of itself. When we mourn the death of a loved one, particularly one so young, we’re saying to ourselves, “He lived, he mattered, he was one of us. He wasn’t just a blip on the radar screen of an otherwise-happy life, but someone whose very existence touched us deeply. And we miss him terribly.” As I’ve said to many of our patients’ family members, tears wash the soul, they irrigate our hearts and keep them supple and alive. The ability to enter into sorrow is one of the markers of a truly-human life.

Counseling students are sometimes advised not to offer a Kleenex to someone who is crying because it supposedly sends a message that the counselor/companion is uncomfortable. I’m not sure that this is always true. I’ve found that when someone has tears on her cheek or perhaps a little mucous coming out of his nose, she or he appreciates that I’m watching and listening closely enough to respond to the need; further, it may mean that I recognize and am in solidarity with the grieving person. I’m not trying to ignore the snot, so to speak, but acknowledging it as part of what the person is going through, while not leaving her or him to wipe it off with a finger.

However we respond to that issue, I think it’s important to understand that good grief work, like the ocean, often washes up like a wave on the shore of our grief-stricken heart. The tears we shed are an outward manifestation of our internal sadness. And it’s important not to hurry the process. I want to tell my grandniece and her husband to take the time to cry and maybe cry and cry again, to hold each other tightly as they walk, not run, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, entering deeply into the experience and knowing that, as Ernest Grollman has written, “The important words are ‘WALK THROUGH.’ You WALK THROUGH. You do not remain where you are.” To which I would add, nor do you walk around. And it is in the love and faith that we bring to this task that we find our true solidarity with our sisters and brothers, as well as the strength to walk with them.

Fr. Larry Hansen

Cana House

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 11:11-15

Jesus said to the crowds: “Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force. All the prophets and the law prophesied up to the time of John. And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come. Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: In the Hebrew scriptures, Elijah does not die a natural death; instead, chariots of fire carry him off to heaven. The Jews of Jesus’ day believed that Elijah would come again to announce the time of the Messiah. For Jesus to say John was Elijah was pregnant with meaning, for by it, Jesus meant that Jesus was the promised one. Jesus emphasizes the importance of the point when he says, Whoever has ears ought to hear. Though he does not say it directly, he does say it for those willing to listen.

Saint of the day: Born January 31, 1915 in Prades in the Pyrénées-Orientales Département of France, Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk and author. Merton wrote more than 50 books, 2,000 poems, and a countless number of essays, reviews, and lectures that have been recorded and published.

Merton was educated in the United States and France before attending Oakham School in England. His father was an artist from New Zealand and his mother was from the United States. His mother died when he was six and his father when he was sixteen. After a disastrous first year at Cambridge University, during which time he fathered an illegitimate child, Merton moved to the United States to live with his grandparents. He proceeded to take his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia University in New York City, where he made the acquaintance of a group of artists and writers who would remain his friends for life.

Merton converted to Catholicism in his early twenties during the period he was writing his master’s thesis on William Blake. His desire to enter the Franciscans being thwarted, he taught at St. Bonaventure’s College, in Olean, New York and, following a retreat at the Trappist (Cistercian of the Strict Observance) Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky during Easter 1941, he came to a crisis with call up looming and was finally accepted as a choir novice (with the intention of becoming a priest) at Gethsemani on December 10, 1941.

During his long years at Gethsemani (where he was encouraged to write) Merton changed from the passionately inward-looking young monk of his most famous book, the autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, to a contemplative writer and poet who became well known for his dialogue with other faiths and his stand on non-violence during the race riots and Vietnam War of the 1960s, and finally achieved the solitude he had long desired in a hermitage in 1965. During these years, he had many battles with his abbot about not being allowed out of the monastery, balanced by his international reputation and huge correspondence with many well-known figures of the day.

A new abbot allowed him the freedom to undertake a tour of Asia at the end of 1968, during which he memorably met the Dalai Lama in India. He also made a visit to Polonnaruwa (in what was then Ceylon), where he had a religious experience while viewing enormous statues of the Buddha. There is speculation that Merton wished to remain in Asia as a hermit. However, he died in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, having touched a badly-grounded electric fan while stepping out of his bath. His body was flown back to Gethsemani where he is buried. Since his death, his influence has continued to grow and he is considered by many to be a twentieth century American mystic.

Merton put a ban on publishing much of his work until 25 years after his death. After that time his diaries were published.

In recognition of his close association with Bellarmine University, the official repository for Merton’s archives is the Thomas Merton Center on the Bellarmine campus in Louisville, Kentucky.

Spiritual reading: It must be admitted therefore that if the gospel of peace is no longer convincing on the lips of Christians, it may well be because they have ceased to give a living example of peace, unity and love. True, we have to understand that the Church was never intended to be absolutely perfect on earth, and she is a Church of sinners, laden with imperfection. Christian peace and Christian charity are based indeed on this need to ‘bear one another’s burdens,’ to accept the infirmities that plague one’s own life and the lives of others. Our unity is a struggle with disunity and our peace exists in the midst of conflict. (Peace in the Post-Christian Era by Thomas Merton)

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 11:28-30

Jesus said to the crowds: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: The great fourteenth century mystic, Dame Juliana of Norwich, had a series of visions in which she intimately communicated with Jesus. Jesus in today’s gospel speaks about taking upon ourselves his yoke, saying that it is easy, and of his burden, that it is light. Dame Juliana recounts of her vision of the Master:

Our good Lord revealed, alluding to his blessed Passion: “With this the fiend is overcome,” just so he said in the last words with perfect fidelity, alluding to us all: “You will not be overcome.” . . . And these words: “You will not be overcome,” were said very insistently and strongly, for certainty and strength against every tribulation which may come. He did not say: “You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted,” but he said: “You will not be overcome.”

When Jesus tells us his yoke is easy and his burden is light, he does not mean we shall not be troubled, belabored, or disquieted. Instead, what he tells us is that he already has won the victory, and we may be confident that he will walk beside us to the end.

Saint of the day: Juan Diego, to whom the Blessed Mother appeared in the 16th century, was a poor Indian peasant who became the Church’s first saint indigenous to the Americas. He was a simple, humble Indian who accepted Christianity without giving up his identity as an Indian. First called Cuauhtlatohuac (“The eagle who speaks”), Juan Diego’s name is forever linked with Our Lady of Guadalupe because it was to him that she first appeared at Tepeyac hill on December 9, 1531. The most famous part of his story is told in connection with the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe which we will celebrate on December 12. After the roses gathered in his tilma were transformed into the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, however, little more is said about Juan Diego.

Born in 1474 in Tlayacac, Cuauhtitlan, about 15 miles north of modern Mexico City, Juan Diego was an impoverished free man in a strongly class-conscious society. A farm worker, field laborer, and mat maker, he was married layman who had no children. A mystical and religious man even as a non-Christian, he became an adult convert to Christianity around age 50, taking the name Juan Diego. His wife died in 1529. The vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe came to him two year later. It was through her image that vast numbers of native people, in wave upon wave, converted to Christianity. In time he lived near the shrine constructed at Tepeyac, revered as a holy, unselfish, and compassionate catechist who taught by word and especially by example. He died May 30, 1548 of natural causes.

Spiritual reading: We should be careful to preserve great purity of heart in the love of God, loving nothing but Him, and desiring to converse with Him alone, and with the neighbor for love of Him and not for our own pleasure and delight. (Letter to the Scholastics at Alcalá by Ignatius of Loyola, 1543)

Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 18:12-14

Jesus said to his disciples, “What is your opinion? If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray? And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that did not stray. In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: The parable of the Good Shepherd reminds us of the deep love that God has for us. God always is reaching out to find us when we stray from the fold, and when we return to God, God rejoices with a perfect delight. There is not a single one that God intends to lose: God loves us unconditionally. When we are tempted to judge, belittle, or even dismiss one another, we perhaps do well to remember that we judge, belittle, or dismiss someone whom God loves without condition.

Saint of the day: A feast called the Conception of Mary arose in the Eastern Church in the seventh century. It came to the West in the eighth century. In the eleventh century it received its present name, the Immaculate Conception. In the eighteenth century it became a feast of the universal Church. It took a long time for this doctrine to develop. While many Fathers and Doctors of the Church considered Mary the greatest and holiest of the saints, they often had difficulty in seeing Mary as sinless—either at her conception or throughout her life. This is one of the Church teachings that arose more from the piety of the faithful than from the insights of brilliant theologians. Even such champions of Mary as Bernard and Thomas Aquinas could not see theological justification for this teaching. But it arose out of the sense of the faithful that Mary was born without the fragility of “original sin,” that is, the innate propensity to fall away from God.

We have limitations inherent in our condition as human beings. We are finite, and because we don’t have everything we need in ourselves, we rely on things outside of ourselves to continue our existence. Sometimes this reliance injures us, as we misuse the resources we need to exist, and sometimes this reliance makes us more complete, as we properly use these resources to make all the things around us, not just ourselves, better and more whole. Most appropriately, when we connect to God’s infinite completeness, we find ourselves made whole and overcome all the limitations of our nature as finite beings. I believe that when the Church speaks about original sin, it really is speaking to the fragility of our being finite and our need for things to make us complete. Mary always automatically understood and behaved in a way that recognized God completed her. This is what we mean by, “Immaculate Conception,” that is, Mary’s utter reliance on God’s completion to satisfy the dilemma of her incomplete nature as a human being.

Spiritual reading: However devoted you are to God, you may be sure that God is immeasurably more devoted to you. (Meister Eckhart)