FOLLOWING JESUS LIGHTENS OUR LOAD

 

Come to me all you who are weary and find life burdensome and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.

Matthew 11:25-30

Seven kids in a small house! I don’t know how my mother did it! She was one of the most generous persons in the whole world, not only to us kids, but to her neighbors as well. She was what I would call “totally selfless.” She was an old-fashioned country mother. Besides giving birth to seven kids, she cleaned, cooked, helped clean the church, did laundry, ironed our clothes and even altar lenins, raised a huge garden, sewed, canned food, raised and slaughtered chickens, helped us with homework, taught us our prayers, took care of us when we were sick and even played with us! I don’t know how she did it, day in and day out, her whole life long, until she finally died of cancer at 58! But every once in a while, the burdens of motherhood weighed her down, sometimes to the breaking point! Even though she loved us and never complained outright, every once in a while she let us know that she would love to have a break from the burdens of motherhood. “All I want is a little peace and quiet, a small white house with a picket fence and a few flowers in the yard!” It never occurred to us that she wanted it without us! She loved us very much. She did not regret the disciplines of motherhood. She only wanted a little relief once in a while. Poor woman! She had to die to get the “peace and quiet” she longed for!

I used to think about my mother a lot, especially when I was a pastor. As much as I love the priesthood, whenever I was over whelmed by its disciplines, I found myself fantasizing about selling all I have, packing my bags and moving to another city where no on knew me, no one expected anything from me, where I could do any damn thing I wanted, whenever I want to do it!  I know it was an illusion. I knew I would miss my life as a priest very much. In retirement, the discipline of being a priest are not so wearisome and burdensome these days. In fact, I enjoy what I am doing because I don’t have to worry about administration, personnel issues and parish finances.

Like my mother’s yearning for relief from the burdens of motherhood! I know I am here to stay! I know that I was just tired back then when I fantasized about leaving whenever I thought the grass might be greener o the other side of the fence. I know that fundamentally the disciplines of priesthood are life-giving for me and they have always been!   

Just like motherhood, marriage and priesthood, which have the ability to give life to people and to drain the life out of them sometimes, Jesus knew that religion has the ability to give life to people, as well as the ability to drain the life out of them. Religion at the time of Jesus was draining the life out of people. But before you rush out and condemn organized religion, know this: Jesus was not against organized religion, but an organized religion that had lost its faith! He wanted, not to condemn organized religion, but to renew it! Jesus did not abandon organized religion because it lost its way, any more than my mother would abandon her kids or most of you your marriages or me the priesthood, just because we are tempted to run for the hills every once in a while! 

Jesus uses the image of a yoke to talk about his discipline versus a religion that had lost its focus. He called the discipline of religion a “yoke,” something that every good Jew recognized as “the Law” or us "the Bible,” if you will.  Jesus was a carpenter. He knew about yokes. He made many of them.  When it came to making yokes for oxen, the carpenter did not make one-size-fits-all. He took a “roughed out” yoke and then trimmed and whittled until it was “custom made” so that it would not gall the neck of the ox who wore it.  Jesus says his yoke is “crestos,” which means “custom made” or “made to order.” Some translations of “crestos” say it means “easy,” but that is not quite the sense that Jesus means. “Crestos” means more like “well fitted or well suited.” Using this image, Jesus says that his spiritual discipline has high expectations and demands a lot, but it is a joy to carry! It’s sort of like that old Boys Town story when the young man who was carrying his brother said, “He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother!”  Healthy religion expects a lot, but a healthy religion gives back even more! That’s what the “yoke of Jesus”  is all about!

I can not imagine life without faith in Jesus and his life-giving discipline. Yes, my own weakness and the weakness of others, weigh me down at times, but  that is nothing compared to the life-giving power that comes with walking with Jesus.  Yes, I have been worn down a few times along the way, but what keeps me going is the certain knowledge that God is at work even now, in spite of any former setbacks or future scandal! As my favorite old hymn goes, “Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear the music ringing. It sounds and echoes in my soul. How can I keep from singing?” Knowing how things will turn out when all of this is said and done, how can we keep from singing?

Keep the faith! Keep the faith!  Our faith has just been fed on God’s Word, now let us go to the table and let God feed our faith with nothing less than Christ’s own body and blood!  Remember that faith, even faith the size of a mustard seed, can move mountains, so keep the faith all the way to the end!  

CHURCH CHAT #35

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO ALL YOU WHO HAD 4TH OF JULY WEDDINGS

Especially If All Your Plans Were Approved

 

WHEN MY BIGGEST IRRATIONAL THOUGHT IS TRIGGERED

During his first years of practicing REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy), the famous American psychologist and psychotherapist, Dr. Albert Ellis saw that practically all of his clients held variations of a dozen or so irrational beliefs. He later reduced them to three. 

September 27, 1913 - July 24, 2007

His Irrational Idea No. 1 is the one that triggers my most serious and regular response. I am getting better at managing it, but a recent e-mailed criticism of one of my homilies from a total stranger triggered an irrational response as soon as I read the criticism. I work hard on my homilies, get a high degree of affirmation and "put them out there" on my blog so I am always vulnerable to being "triggered" by a critical response. I know it is irrational. I have worked hard to lower my being "triggered" because I realize such a response is irrational. I also know that others are "triggered" much more often than me so I have decided to share this one personal experience in the hopes that it will help someone else who gets "triggered" into an irrational response when they, or their work, is rejected or criticized.

Irrational Idea No. 1 

The idea that it is a dire necessity for an adult human being to be loved or approved of by virtually every significant other person in his community. 

- It’s impossible to be liked or loved by everybody. No matter how popular you are, there will always be someone who doesn’t like you.

- Even if you could get everybody to like or love you, you would never know if they liked you enough, or if they still liked you.

- Different people have different tastes. Some people might like (for example) your new hairstyle; other people might hate it. Therefore, no matter what you do, some people will admire you, and some people won’t.

- Getting people to like you takes time and effort. If you try to get everyone to like you, you won’t have any time or energy left over to do the things that you want to do.

- If you demand others’ approval, you’ll always be doing what they want you to do, instead of doing what you want to do with your time and your life. Your life will no longer be your own.

- If you try too hard to be loved or approved, people will soon tire of your constant sycophancy, and they will not respect you.

- Paying too much attention to how much love and approval you are receiving, means you won’t pay enough attention to how much love and approval you are giving.

- There’s no harm in trying to be popular, but it’s best not to try too hard. In other words, it’s self-helping to want to be popular, but it’s self-defeating to need to be popular.

- Having love and approval means you’ll find it easier to have friends, to find and keep a job, to find accommodation, etc. But just because other people approve of you doesn’t mean that you’ll like yourself. It’s better to strive for unconditional self-acceptance; i.e., you accept yourself, regardless of what others think of you.

- It’s not pleasant when other people don’t like you, but it’s not awful, it’s not the end of the world, and it’s not fatal.

"HE WHO WATERS OTHERS WILL HIMSELF BE WATERED" Prv.11:25

BISHOP FILBERT MHASI

Diocese of Tunduru-Masasi in Tanzania, East Africa

Bishop Mhasi would like to thank all the donor-friends of Father Ronald Knott and Father John Judie, who have helped finish his new Cardinal Polycarp Pendo Primary School which had been sitting half-finished for the last few of years. This new Catholic school is scheduled to open this July (pictures of the school opening will follow in an upcoming blog post). The school will open with the first four of six classrooms this July - with the final two classrooms opened next year hopefully.  The school now consists of a classroom building, an administration building, a library/kitchen/lunchroom building, new large outhouse toilets, a newly drilled water well, along with some cows to provide milk and meat for the school kids.  

I have also gathered, and have ready to send, some desperately needed school supplies which many parents cannot afford.   To save money, Father John will start taking some of them with him on July 12 on his next trip and the rest on his following trip in late August. I collected over 1,500 misprinted and used pens and the same number of new pencils, along with a variety of other needed school supplies like erasers, small pencil sharpeners, plastic rulers and even a few hand-held solar-powered calculators (no batteries needed) and so on. We cannot send paper products because of the weight. It would be cheaper to send the funds to buy school paper locally. 

This school will address three major problems in his Diocese of Tunduru-Masasi: generational poverty, early Christian-Muslim relationships and the reduction of the need for migration into other countries. Interestingly enough, in a predominately Muslim diocese, some of the Muslim parents approached Bishop Mhasi about building a school for their children to attend along with the children of his diocese. Even some of the local Muslim leaders showed up at a Third Sunday of Advent Mass (notice the rose vestments of the day) celebrated at one of Bishop Mhasi's many mission stations. 

                                                        

On May 30th, I got another bit of good news about a funeral for one of his priests - Father Joel Tindawa. Among the 300 attendees were some Muslims, the Anglican Bishop and the Lutheran Bishop. His effort to build good interfaith relationships, starting in early childhood, will surely produce more great results in his predominately Muslim diocese in Tanzania with this new school.   

Our goal is to finish the last two classrooms by next school year. If you would like to help with the last two classrooms which will complete this school, please send your tax-deductible checks, made out to Father John Judie Ministries, to me for deposit in that account:

Rev. Ronald Knott 

1271 Parkway Gardens Court

#106

Louisville, KY 40217

 

 

GIVE AND IT WILL BE GIVEN TO YOU

Whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink will surely not lose his reward.

Matthew 10:37-42

I have tried to live that Old Testament Proverb (11:25) that says, “He who waters others will himself be watered.” I was reminded of it when I saw the first reading and the gospel reading for today. Both readings teach us about God rewarding people for their generosity. The first reading tells us about how a woman, who built a little guest room in her house for the Prophet Elisha to stay in, was blessed with the baby that she had longed for over the years. In the gospel, Jesus promises a reward for every good deed, from welcoming a prophet to giving a child a cup of water.

All my life, I have had experiences of having my generous gestures come back to me a hundred-fold. Let me tell you just one story from my days down in the home missions of the diocese back when I was a young priest.

As the first Catholic priest to live in Wayne County, Kentucky, I was stationed at a mission church down along the Tennessee border. We had a handful, less than a dozen, of parishioners and money was very tight. In fact, one of my first jobs was to raise my own salary. Often it was a strain to even pay the church’s electric bill. I lived in the basement of the church to save the parish money. One of the ministries we had was a used clothing store for poor people who needed access to cheap clothing. One day, we got a load of clothes from the family of a man from Louisville who had died. I was going through his stuff, trying to organize it, when I came across a box of old shoes. In the bottom of the box, under the shoes, was a stack of $20 bills that amounted to about $400.00. I knew in my heart of hearts that the old man had hidden it there before he died and that the family was not aware of it. I stood there holding the $400.00, knowing that we could really use it, but also knowing that the family did not know what they had given us. I finally decided to send it back to the family who thanked me for my honesty. A few months went by and then one day a letter came in the mail. The family sent us a $1,000.00 check from his estate because we had been so honest!

That kind of thing happened all the time down there. We would get down to almost nothing, be generous to someone even needier than we were, only to see an unplanned donation come in from some unexpected source, often on the same day! It happened when I was a volunteer missionary in the Caribbean Missions a couple of years back. It happened during the St. Theresa Family Life Center and Guest House project that I just recently finished down in my home parish in Meade County. It is happening in my mission projects in Africa. In fact, this past Christmas Eve, I was short a few hundred dollars of my goal to finish the school building I was working on by Christmas! I went to the mail box that Christmas Eve and opened a letter that had a check in it that miraculously met our goal. I stood there amazed because I thought we would be short! It was a very last-minute miracle for sure!   

I first learned this "give-and-receive" dynamic from my mother. She had very little money, but she was a serious “giver,” from things out of her vegetable garden to loving compliments and kindly gestures, which always seem to come back to her in abundance. I have seen that dynamic play out over and over again in my 56 years as a priest. It has happened so many times that I was moved to have these words engraved on my new tombstone: "Simply Amazed - Forever Grateful!"  That’s probably where I got the idea of writing a column every week for fifteen years called An Encouraging Word. In it, I doubled-down on the spiritual practice of blessing people, not necessarily with material things, but even more so with encouragement which cost me nothing to give.  

"He who waters will be watered!" I was paid nothing for my fifteen years of writing those weekly columns, but nothing brought more blessings into my life than the practice of looking for people to compliment and encourage and then expressing what I had seen in that column. The idea was simple. I looked around for goodness to affirm rather than evils to condemn. Indeed, “He who waters will himself be watered!” Jesus put it this way, “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap.” (Luke 6:38)

Ever since I have adopted this spiritual practice in a serious way, I have also noticed in an ever-sharper focused way how many people, consciously or unconsciously, engage in the mean and ultimately self-defeating practice of withholding compliments. There may be even more people who stick their heads out a bit and then pull them back in giving praise, which may actually be even more cowardly. Henry Ward Beecher nailed it when he said, “The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speak well of a man and then qualifies it with a “but.” Here is how that goes! “Your hair looks great, but you need to lose some of that weight!”  "That was a good homily, but it was much too long! 

Why is it so hard for some people to offer a direct, clear and unconditional compliment? Why does it seem like an “ascetical” practice that goes against our nature? I guess it goes all the way back to Cain and Abel. Cain became “resentful and crestfallen” because God looked with favor on his brother’s offering. This sin is alive and well even in clerical circles. Father Andrew Greeley once wrote (probably about the withholding he felt from his fellow priests in Chicago) that “the worst thing a diocesan priest can do is to get good at something.” I have felt what he was talking about. Several years into writing my column, I overheard one of my brother priests say loud enough for me to hear, "Oh, that Knott! He's never had a thought he hasn't published!" 

We have all heard the old saying, “What goes around, comes around.” Paul expands on that wisdom when he wrote to the Galatians. “A person will reap only what he sows. Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up. So then, while we have the opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who belong to the family of the faith.” (Galatians 6:7-10)

If we need to be loved, need to be appreciated, need to be noticed or need to be honored, the best way to get it is for us to extend love, to show appreciation, to pay attention to others and to honor them. Writing that column, looking for opportunities to bless others, brought me more blessings than I could ever have imagined. Hardly a day went by that I did not get a note, an email, a call or a greeting of appreciation in public places by people I had never met. I still receive encouraging words from people who remember it, even though I quit writing that column nine years ago!

For me, writing that column was a spiritual practice. I still try to carry on that practice of blessing people in various other ways. By watering others, I have certainly been watered! I have learned the truth that if you give to others what you need, it comes back to you multiplied! I know that those of you listening to me today know exactly what I mean. You have been generous and you know your generosity always comes back to you!   By watering others, you have been watered! My only prayer at this time is that God has abundantly rewarded all those people who have reached out to help us personally over the years --- and there have been many! They have our deepest gratitude and my prayer is that God has rewarded them a thousand times over for their generosity to us!     

 

 

 

CHURCH CHAT #34

 
The newly elected Pope Leo praying at the simple tomb of the recently deceased Pope Francis.