USEFUL WISDOM FOR 2024 #44

 

 

HOSPITALITY FOR THE LEFT-OUT AND LEFT-BEHIND

    

LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR 11-4-2024

“Radical Hospitality”

Rev. Ronald Knott

"When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, in case they may invite you back and you have repayment. Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.

Luke 14:12-14

Today, I would like to simply give you several examples of how this gospel has been lived out in my experience and those I have ministered to and those with whom I have ministered!

First of all, I had to look no further than right here in this place. A pious French woman, Jeanne Jugan, having felt the need to care for the many impoverished elderly who lined the street of French towns and cities, established this Congregation to care for the elderly in 1839. Now, her Sisters are serving the elderly all over the world, especially those who can never re-pay them. The gospel calls these Sisters and the people who serve with them “Blessed.”    

I have always had a heart for the marginalized and the left out. Let me tell you about how I have personally tried to follow the challenge in today’s gospel.  

When I was pastor of the Cathedral, I received an elderly woman into the Church. She had an estranged son who lived far away and a couple of relatives who lived locally but paid very little attention to her. On Mother’s Day, since my own mother had died a few years earlier, instead of going to one of my sister’s houses down in Meade County, I would cook a delicious meal for her, go pick her up and treat her like she had won a place on the old TV show “Queen for a Day!” I did that for years until she died!  

Before I moved to Louisville as pastor of the Cathedral, I was pastor of Holy Name of Mary Church in the center of the state in the little village of Calvary. For the years I was there, every year on February 14 I would host a Valentine’s Party for Seniors at the rectory rather than accept invitations from other people. I tried to “smother” them with love and appreciation, especially those who were widows and widowers. I even got High School kids to come and dance with them one year. We played BINGO for little prizes to take home and provided the type of food I knew they would enjoy with enough left over to take some home for supper if they lived alone.  

After I left the Cathedral and started working as a staff member at St. Meinrad Seminary, I was especially attentive to the foreign-born seminarians. I bought coats on sale and made them available to the guys who arrived in the US in the summer from hot climates. When the weather turned cold, they had no coats and no extra money to buy them. I would have as many as 15-25 coats of various sizes in my office to give away that I had bought on sale last spring when people quit buying coats.  

Instead of going to my own family and gorging myself on fine food, I invited the foreign-born seminarians without families in this country to come to my condo for a Thanksgiving meal. I went all out. I did the cooking myself for several years, but as the group grew, a nice restaurant here in town helped me out and cooked the food for me. All I had to do is set the table, supply the drinks, go pick it up and meet them at the door. Tongue-in-cheek, I called it my Thanksgiving Dinner for the Left-Behind!

As pastor of the Cathedral that had dwindled down to 110 elderly members, I was appointed by Archbishop Kelly to “revitalize” the congregation. I knew it would be almost impossible to convert enough people to Catholicism to fill the rolls. I knew that it was not kosher to build the roles by stealing Catholics out of other parishes. I decided to go after marginalized Catholics, non-practicing Catholics and Catholics who had been hurt or rejected in other parishes. We gained several nicknames and mottos. We use to say openly. that “We’ll take anybody!” Being the “mother church of the diocese,” we would proudly say, “You can always come home to Mother!” We were called the “Island of Misfit Toys” from the children’s TV special ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” The “Island of Misfit Toys” was that special place where broke toys could go to be repaired so they, too, could be part of Christmas! We welcomed hundreds of “fallen away Catholics” back to church.

When I was one of the Campus Ministry Chaplains at Bellarmine University, I started a special Mass for the grieving every Christmas eve for many years. No one else was doing it.  I called it my annual “Blue Christmas Mass.” It was very popular because it met a very specific need. We always advertised that it was for the grieving only. It was for people who had lost children, spouses and family members from suicide, heart attacks, automobile accidents, murders, old age and whatever. Most people told me that they had always dreaded going to Mass on Christmas because they could not bring themselves to attend a “happy Christmas Mass” that only reminded them of their losses. The homily was always directed at consoling them. Instead of singing JOY TO THE WORLD, we sang softer music like SILENT NIGHT and AWAY IN A MANGER. They left consoled instead of depressed about those they had lost! We always gave them a small gift to help remind them of those special Masses throughout the coming year: a blue star, a pregnant Mary statue, a Sleeping St. Joseph Statue, a Mended Broken Heart artwork.

I am sure you have similar experiences of times you have ignored your own needs to meet the needs of the “poor, crippled, lame and blind” as the gospel puts it today! If you have, you know what it’s like to have that feeling of being “blessed indeed!”

LOVING ONESELF DOES NOT MEAN SELFISHNESS

          

THE PATH TO PERSONAL EXCELLENCE

Loving Yourself And Loving What You Do

Rev. Ronald Knott

 

The first ingredient in really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to personal excellence – to loving who you really are - enough to care about becoming your best self. Really loving oneself does not mean papering oneself, but doing hard things for one’s own good. One of the most critical needs here is the need for a capacity for critical and constructive self-awareness. You must be able to know and understand what makes you tick. You must own your own personal history and heal it if necessary. In short, you must be dedicated first of all to becoming your best as a quality human person. Let me put that another way. (a) You cannot take a loser and ordain him and expect to have an effective priest! If he is not a quality human being to begin with, all you will end up with is a loser priest who can’t relate to people or inspire them to hunger for holiness. (b) You cannot take two losers and put them through a wedding and expect to end up with a happy marriage and effective parents! If they are not quality human beings to begin with, all you will end with is a miserable marriage and disastrous parents!

The second ingredient in really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to vocational excellence – to what you do. In other words, if you are a parent, commit yourself to being the very best parent you can be! If you are married, commit yourself to being the best husband or wife you can be! If you are a priest, commit yourself to be the best priest you can possibly be! Whatever you do, be good at it! If you strive to be the best at what you do, you will get better at it. If you choose the “good enough to get by” path, you will become known for your mediocrity. Without a passionate commitment to vocational excellence, you will no doubt end up being a half-assed priest, a half-assed marriage partner or half-assed parent! The world is already overcrowded with mediocrity – with “half-assedness” - people with no passion for personal or vocational excellence! My mother used to call them “people who merely go through the motions,” “people whose hearts are not in it.” God says to us in Revelations 3:15-16, “Would that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” May you be spared from half-assedness!”

May you be the very best version of yourself, a person passionately committed to your own personal and vocational excellence, a person committed to becoming your best self and committed to excellence at what you do!

I KNOW WHAT IT SAYS, BUT WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY MEAN?

Jesus said to his disciples: "In those days after that tribulation

the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,

and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the

heavens will be shaken.” “But of that day or hour, no one knows,

neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

Mark 13:24-32

Every year, when another calendar year begins to wind down in November, we begin to hear readings about “the end of the world” at our weekend Masses ending with the Feast of Christ the King. The very next Sunday after that, we start all over again looking forward to the coming birth of Jesus.

This is also that time of year when fundamentalist Christians come out of the woodwork searching the Scriptures, on their own, looking for clues as to the coming “doom and gloom” as a way to scare people into “shaping up before it’s too late.” 

In spite of Jesus’ admonition that “no one knows” when and how the end of the world will happen, these “fundamentalists” proceed with a conviction of the validity of their own private and literal interpretations of these “end times” texts and preach their conclusions with fervor and furor!

Just the other day, the man who came to my condo to conduct the annual inspection of my furnace, saw an opening in the conversation to talk about his interpretation of texts dealing with “the end times,” “the rapture” and cited how “only 144,000 people will be saved.” He even told me that he had translated the Bible into some native African language! He touted his trust in his own ability to translate the Bible correctly from one language to another – something even many learned Scripture scholars would find too hard to do! I find these “private and literal interpreters of Scripture people” annoying, but when they start announcing to the world that the Bible actually predicts, in their rock-solid certain private interpretation, that one political candidate was predicted to be a “savior of the world” while his opposing political candidate is “the Anti-Christ,” I want to scream to high heavens!

Centuries ago, before the invention of the printing press and before the average person could read or write, there was often only one hand-copied Bible in a Cathedral Church, but no one but the educated could read it. So, “private interpretation” was not a big problem. Many of our pious devotions come from those days when illiteracy was common. (1) The 150 psalms were being sung by literate monks and read by literate clergy, while the illiterate laity were given the full Rosary, with its 150 beads. They could pray mostly repetitious memorized “Hail Marys” while reflecting quietly on the “mysteries” of Christ’s life from memory. (2) Instead of reading the Bible to children, illiterate parents would take their children to church and show them the Bible stories in the sculptures, paintings and stained-glass windows of their churches! Now you know why we have so many statues, paintings and stain glass windows in our churches! 

With the invention of the printing press and its many translations into the evolving national languages, private interpretation with the spin-off of multiple new break-away churches, the Catholic Church resisted the idea of Bible reading in general and the idea of competing private interpretations as a way to stem heresies and the accompanying discord they caused. Instead, they gave us a little book with its approved interpretations of major Scripture texts and their meanings. That little book was what we knew as the “Catechism.” When I attended our parish Catholic School, none of us owned Bibles, we owned a small Baltimore Catechism that told us what the Bible said and more importantly what its major passages meant! Even the priest did not usually preach on the Sunday Bible Readings, but preached on one of the themes in the Baltimore Catechism. One was not encouraged to “read the Bible,” out of fear that “private interpretation” might lead to heresy. One was given the “approved answers to Biblical research” in the Catechism. The message to the faithful was “trust the Church,” but “don’t trust yourself” to understand the Bible! History has proven that there was lot of truth in that!

Take the scary passage in today’s gospel. It talks about “cosmic upheaval:” a darkened sun and moon, falling stars and the heavens being shaken. There are at least three possibilities about the interpretation of that passage. (1) It could be talking about the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple which did come about in 70 AD! (2) It could be talking about the passion and death of Jesus when “darkness came over the whole land” that the Gospel of Mark describes, which did come about around 32 AD! (3) It could be talking about some future “cosmic chaos” that would accompany some unknown day or hour as a result of the arrival of the end of time. Private interpretation could lead to at least three or more conflicting possibilities. If I believe a passage means one thing and you believe a contradictory meaning, one of us, or both of us, could be wrong!

“Private interpretation,” apart from the help of the church’s teaching authority, can lead to some dangerous, if not strange, conclusions. I know from experience. I kept a newspaper clipping about an incident down in Russell County, Kentucky, when I was working in that area that explains the danger of “private interpretation” of the Bible. A man read in the Bible (Matthew 15:30) that “if your right hand is an occasion of sin to you, cut it off and throw it away” so he took a chainsaw and cut off his right hand! Is that passage to be taken literally or was Jesus using dramatic language of the time about getting to the source of the sin? Committing sin, of course is a decision of the mind apart from the hand itself! The cure is not in the hand, but in the mind and heart where the decision to sin resides!

On the other hand, Jesus said at the Last Supper: “This is my Body and this is my Blood!” Catholics take “is” literally, while Protestants take it to mean, “this is only symbolic of my Body and Blood!” Both can’t be right! Catholics have relied on history, tradition and scholarship to inform us as to what it really means! “Private interpretation” enthusiasts have relied on “private interpretation” as to its “only symbolic” meaning!

There is an old saying that I think applies here. It says, “You always find what you look for!” In Scripture, you can find justification for both compassion and cruelty, judgement and mercy! It depends on what you look for and why one interpretation would be so important to you! Does it justify your already arrived at conclusion or is it what the writer originally meant? The question then is why would you apply such scary literalism to today’s Scripture passage and not another passage that says: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, the wonderful things God has is store for those who love him.” and "God is love."?  Is God a God of mercy and compassion or a God of judgment and condemnation, a God of love or a God of hate, a God of unity or a God of division? You can find both in Scripture, so it can end up depending on what the looker is looking for and needs to believe at the time! 

Even today, now that most people are literate in this country, the Catholic Church encourages Bible reading with the guidance of its many good interpretation resources. It is important to remember that the Bible didn’t fall out of the sky nor did Jesus pass out Bibles as instruction books at the Ascension! The Bible is not one book, but a library of smaller books, written over 1,000 years by different people. The Bible as we know it took many years to assemble after the death of Jesus. Like a modern newspaper, which has facts, opinions, humor and advice, one who reads the Bible needs help interpreting which is which! To read it without the help and advice of biblical scholars is to invite all kinds of heresy and chaos into the church! In that case, it is probably better not to go it alone and run the risk of twisting the Word of God to make it mean whatever you want! Help is required and help is available!