THE PAIN OF BEING MARY

This painting by Polish painter, Piotr Stachiewicz, is entitled "Christ's Farewell to Mary." It depicts Jesus leaving his mother in Nazareth to begin his public ministry. This painful moment in Mary's life shows Jesus kissing Mary's hand and Mary stroking Jesus' hair as his walking stick and drinking jug wait on the ground. 

Blessed are you among women, Mary. Blessed are you

who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord

would be fulfilled.

Luke 1:39-45

Back when I was a young priest, while I was associate pastor at St. Mildred Church in Somerset, Kentucky, I designed several large banners for the church. Banners were very popular back in the 1970s. The people seemed to appreciate most of them, but one of them raised more than one old lady's eyebrows. It pictured a very pregnant Mary, sitting in a rocking chair deep in meditation, her arms folded carefully over her swollen abdomen. I was trying to capture the words of the gospel in the Annunciation story: “Mary was deeply troubled by the angel's words and wondered what his greeting meant.” I tried to imagine Mary sitting around her house trying to figure out what her surprise pregnancy meant and where her life would lead. After all, she was an unwed mother in the eyes of the Jewish law of her day. Well, the banner was seen as a bit blasphemous in the eyes of some of the very pious. l stood my ground and it went up every year while I was there. The people finally got used to it and many came to love it.

In the first chapter of Luke, Mary is called “blessed” no fewer than three times, once by the angel Gabriel and twice by her cousin Elizabeth in today’s text. “Blessedness” is not all it’s cracked up to be! It’s certainly not all peaches and cream, not by a long shot. Mary was granted the blessedness of being the mother of the Son of God. Because of the blessedness, her heart was filled with a mixture both joy and sorrow. It was almost as if she could smell a rat! Her blessedness came to be a sword piercing her heart. It would lead someday to seeing her son hanging on a cross, spit on and despised by a mocking crowds.

To be chosen and blessed by God has its ups and downs. It means great joy and it means great sorrow. Ask anyone who has ever had such a call from God! Ask Peter, Paul, John the Baptist, any of the martyrs, Theresa, Augustine, Joseph, Abraham and Sarah, Jeremiah, Jonah or Isaiah. Ask any of the millions of parents, priests and sisters – anyone who have been called by God for some special task. The raw truth is that God does not choose a person for ease and comfort, but to use that person for his special designs and purposes. To be called by God is a scary adventure. With that honor and privilege comes awesome responsibility. Nowhere can we better see the paradox of blessedness than in the life of Mary. She had the joy of being the mother of the Son of God but she also had to face the ridicule of her neighbors, the possibility of being abandoned by Joseph, the disappearance of Jesus for three days when he was a boy, the possibility that he had lost his mind when he was a young rabbi and, finally, his cruel and tortured death when he was a young man.

Mary was “blessed” alright. However, the gospels honor her not so much for her unique and privileged position as “mother” as for her total trust in God no matter what! “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” As the privileged mother we can admire her. As one who totally trusts God, in good times and bad, we can emulate her!

Like Mary’s “blessedness,” this holiday season will, no doubt, be a confusing mixture of joy and sadness. I have heard story after story of happy engagements, heroic generosity, new families being reunited, reconciliations among old enemies, beautiful celebrations and jobs found. I have also heard a lot of sad stories about unemployment, terrible sickness, old people in nursing homes who cannot die, broken marriages, family fights and auto accidents. In fact for me, being “blessed” by God means being in a position to be able to absorb these stories. One minute I will get a letter from a parishioner who tells me how much closer he or she has drawn to God because of a homily I have given or something I have written; the next minute the phone rings telling mg me about a newly discovered cancer or upcoming surgery. One minute I am going to a Christmas party; the next minute l am on my way to a friend's funeral. One morning I am stopped by someone in the street who gushes with compliments about something I have done for them; by midafternoon I get a royal chewing out by someone else for something I have overlooked or forgotten. 

A priest’s life, much like a parent’s life, is often a blessed life and often a pain-filled life. Many of you parents have told me about one of your children who brought you so much joy as a child who now brings you so much pain as a young adult with their addictions and bad choices. The life of a priest and the life of  a parent can often be very much alike. We can be forced into situations where we laugh one minute and cry the next, all in a day’s time!

Most evenings, when it all quiets down and I am alone with my thoughts, I just sit down in a big chair with my journal and wonder what it all means. Some evenings, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Like Mary in her rocking chair in that old banner I designed years ago, I just sit there and wonder what it all means and where it will all lead. Like Mary kneeling before the angel Gabriel, I am reminded of words like: “Do not fear,” “God is at work here," and "Trust God, believe in yourself and dare to dream.”

My friends, on this fourth Sunday of Advent, the church holds Mary up to us as a model of complete trust in God - in good times and in bad, through thick and thin. Somehow, many of us have gotten the impression that problems, pain and disillusionment are signs of God's absence. Mary teaches us that all our confusing mixtures of joy and sorrow are actually signs of “blessedness,” signs that God is indeed active in our lives and all our troubles can eventually be turned to good.

My friends, don't let Advent go by this year without a few minutes in a rocking chair with Mary, pondering what the events of your life mean. Advent is a time to renew our commitment to trust God no matter what, and patiently wait for insight into what it all means and direction on how to proceed! When we don't have answers is when we need to trust - to trust that God is an charge and that all things will eventually turn out for the good. 

"Blessed are we who have believed that what was spoken to us by the Lord will be fulfilled."

WANT AN ANXIOUS-FREE LIFE? LEARN TO TRUST GOD!

Have no anxiety at all. Let the peace that God

gives, guard your hearts and minds.

Philippians 4

St. Paul has got to be kidding! No anxiety at all? With our Church at war with itself where even Pope Francis is being attacked by some Bishops and other self-claiming "true" Catholics, with an ever present vocation crisis, with religious communities either merging or going out of existence and with whole parishes either dwindling, merging or closing altogether, how can we not be anxious?

With our country at war with itself where congressmen and congresswomen are ripping one another to shreds publicly and threatening one another's lives out in the open, where voting restrictions on minority groups continues to tighten, where mobs of looters are invading stores, where the internet is filled with hate and lies and the validity of our elections are challenged, how can we not be anxious?

With dictators seizing power in more and more countries, with COVID variants continuing to spread and with global warming causing more and more natural disasters, how can we not be anxious?

How can Saint Paul’s words about not being anxious possibly fit those of us living in today’s Church and today's world? How can we possibly remain anxiety-free in the middle of all these situations?

“Anxiety” is a state of intense, often disabling apprehension, uncertainty, and fear caused by the anticipation of something threatening. The key word is anticipation. Anxiety is often not so much about what is happening or even what has happened, but about what might happen.

Have no anxiety at all. Let the peace that God

gives, guard your hearts and mind.

My dear mother comes to mind when I think of anxiety. It seems that she always had a thin stream of anxiety trickling through her veins. Even though she has been dead for forty-five years now, I can still see her in my mind’s eye picking at her lower lip, a nervous habit that always accompanied intense moments of anxiety. I can still remember one time when we laughed at her for being so anxious. She snapped back, “Well, somebody around here needs to worry!” Looking back, she had a lot to be anxious about: seven kids, a demanding husband and breast cancer, to name only a few!

When I was about to be ordained, anxiety was very much on my mind. I spoke about this a couple of weeks ago. The church was undergoing a great upheaval and priests were beginning to leave in significant numbers. I asked myself many times, in that year leading up to ordination, “How am I going to keep my cool in a fast-changing church and in a world coming unglued? How will I be able to stay focused when one problem after another is going to be hurled into my face from both inside and outside the church? How will I be able to calm others when I seem to be torn up all the time myself?”

I have spent my life as a priest searching for an inmost calm that no storm can shake. When I discovered and admitted to myself that I cannot control what happens "out there," I knew I must find a way to control my reactions to what happens out there. As one spiritual teacher said, “It is easier to put on slippers than it is to carpet the world.” I knew I was going to need, and certainly wanted to have, the peace that only a close relationship with Jesus could give me, that peace that Saint Paul invites us to embrace in our second reading today.

Have no anxiety at all. Let the peace that God

gives, guard your hearts and minds.

I spent most of my young adult life looking for an inmost calm that no storm could shake, an inner peace that would remain rock solid no matter what! I am, happy to say that I have found it. Sometimes I panic and sometimes I forget, but I always come back to it sooner or later. Once I discovered that a peaceful center is available to me, I know I can always come back to it.

How can one have that peace? A close relationship with Jesus brings that peace. If you truly believe that you are loved without condition, that God is on your side and holds no grudges, that in the end things are going to turn out OK because God has promised us so, then a great peace will come over you. You will know that no matter how bad things get sometimes, no matter how much you have to handle, no matter how great your losses, you will know in your heart of hearts that you are in good hands because you are in God’s hands. When you know these things to be true, a great peace begins to stand guard over your heart and mind! That is what St. Paul is talking about today when he tells us to “let the peace that God gives guard you hearts and minds.”

Once I began to live in the knowledge that, in spite of it all, things will ultimately be OK, I began to realize that many of my life’s greatest blessings have come out of what long ago seemed like an unbearable disaster. Looking back at the times in my life when God seemed absent, at the times when I was overwhelmed with anxiety, worry and panic, in hindsight I can see that the hand of God was actually bringing me to where I needed to go and teaching me what I needed to learn. Most of the things I have worried about never happened! Statistics even tell us that fully 90% of the things we worry about never happen! Most of my imagined tragedies have actually contained great blessings! It has happened too many times to dismiss as a fluke.

I went through one of those anxious periods again as I was going into retirement. The plans I had worked on for three years fell apart in three days. It may not be connected, but I ended up in the hospital a couple of days later with a blood clot in my left leg. I was grieving the loss of some of the things I expected to happen. If things had worked out the way I planned, I would have gotten on an airplane for France, not knowing about the clot, and died on that plane either on the way over or on the way back! I have recovered from the clot, but as it turned out God spared me from what I thought I wanted and offered me something even better.

For me, this seems to be the way it always happens - a big breakdown before a big break through! I look back now and I am happy that my original plans did not work out because something much better happened - my missionary work in the island country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines! When COVID hit and their volcano erupted, I was forced to end that work. Now I look back and I am OK with the fact that it no longer worked out because something else came along - the remodeling of my now closed-for-twenty-eight-years, Saint Theresa School, into a new Saint Theresa Family Life Center down in my home parish in Meade County. 

Peace, however, is not a time when there are no problems. Peace is a calm state of mind in the midst of problems and in spite of problems. Peace is a trusting state of mind that comes from a close relationship with Jesus whose name is Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.”

Brothers and sisters, we cannot control most of what is going to happen, so let us finish each day and be done with it. Let us do our best and then let go of it. Let us not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Our fretting anxiety has no power to affect tomorrow, but it can certainly ruin today. Let us thank God for how far we have come and trust God with how far we can go. This peace of mind is Jesus’ last gift to us.

Let me end with one of my very favorite prayers by St. Francis DeSales. “Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, then, put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations.

Friends, we will never be problem free, but we can be free of anxiety and needless worry!

 

WARMING UP TO JOHN THE BAPTIST

Reprinted From

AN ENCOURAGING WORD

A Collection of Cathedral Homilies Given by Father Ronald Knott

Cathedral of the Assumption

Published in 1995

John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan,

proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Luke 3:1-6

He had a beard, so he can't be all bad. In spite of his beard, John the Baptist has never been one of my favorite saints. Screaming men who wear fur coats and eat bugs make me very nervous. He was not the type of person you sit out on the deck and have a beer with. Before you could pop the top, he'd be giving you a lecture on the evils of drinking. He has always reminded me of those people who have just gotten back from making a Cursillo or a trip to Medjugorje and can’t wait to get in your face and redo your life for you. You know that condescending attitude that says; "I know the truth now and I’m sorry you're so defective." As soon as they start talking, I look for the nearest exit. I've always wanted to say to him: "John, buddy, lighten up! 

But as I have gotten older and wiser; I have begun to appreciate John a little more, In fact, maybe he could be a role model for today's American Catholic. John the Baptist stands out as a believer who is both critical and committed, the two essential ingredients most needed in today's church. He, above all, seems to have found a balance between those two poles.

As our church continues to undergo massive transformation, the tension between the left and the right continues to produce anxiety in the hearts of believers everywhere. It seems that zealots at both ends of the spectrum are claiming to own the truth. Somehow, we must cooperate and give up our competition, separatism, and fragments of the truth. Maybe John the Baptist can teach us to ignore zealots of every stripe and listen to the less shrill voices of reason and joy. Maybe we can find some common ground between the hypercritical and the blindly committed. Maybe John can teach us to be both critical and committed.

Criticism, without commitment, is cruelty. There is a growing number of Catholic people who have moved to the edges or left the church altogether to take potshots at the church from their safe positions of smug superiority. They have their well-documented lists of flaws and sins to justify their withdrawal from active church life and are willing to point them out on cue. They are like the people who look at a thorny bush with a single flower and see a thornbush rather than a rosebush. Behind their superior attitude is a belief that others are responsible for the health of the church, and they will not grace the church with their presence until it conforms to their point of view.

Just as dangerous are those who are committed without being critical. Even Pope John Paul II, when he was still Cardinal Wojtyla, wrote in 1969: “Conformism means the death of any community; a loyal opposition is a necessity in any community.” Blind commitment without question is also unhealthy for the church. There are those among us who would have us believe that anything our leaders say or do should be followed without question, without hesitation.

Sometimes the church's best friends are those who criticize it. A very respected spiritual writer in our church, Louis Evely; far from being a radical, has written: "The church is dying, and her murderers are those clerics who spend their lives repeating what was said before their time and redoing what was done when they were young. True fidelity is inventive. A faith that asks no questions is not faith. A faith that is not able to put up with questions is not faith. To have faith means to have enough light to be willing to tolerate certain areas of darkness." 

Read church history. Its history is darkest when its prophets were silenced. Prophets challenge too much belief in the status quo. Those who question some of the positions of the church may be its best friends. A case in point: the Vatican defended slavery during the American Civil War. Would disagreement with that position then make you a bad Catholic? No! It would actually make you a real Catholic! Our history is full of cases where we were saved from our own foolishness and cowardice by people who made waves. those who made "good trouble." 

Criticism without commitment is cruelty. Commitment without criticism is lazy, sentimental, and infantile. What is needed is the spirit of John the Baptist. He was both critical and committed. What we really need today is people who care enough and love enough to raise some questions. We need committed people who are willing, in the words of Saint Paul, to "profess the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15). Those who drop out and attack from the outside are no help.  Those who stay and bury their heads in blind conformity are dangerous and destructive. What we need is people who are committed but vigilant and attentive, knowing in their hearts that this old church requires, in the words of Pope Paul VI, “that continual reformation of which she always has need.” What we need are people who are committed, not to forms and old ways of doing things, but to the gospel itself; people who understand that if we are too concerned with preserving our old wineskins, then we shall inevitably lose the new wine.

As a pastor, I was sometimes caught in a tug of war between the critical and the committed. I tried to model myself after John the Baptist. I have tried to model for you the marriage of those two perspectives. I have tried, especially in my preaching, to be both carefully critical and deeply committed. It's not always a comfortable position, but I believe it is a spiritually healthy position. After all, there is "this treasure we possess in earthen vessels" (2 Corinthians 4:7), and we need to know the difference between the treasure and the crock.

SO THEY CALL YOU A KING?

 "My kingdom does not belong to this world. My kingdom is not here."

John 18:33b-37

 

Surely, you have heard the expression “God’s ways are not our ways!” It means that God thinks differently from the way we human beings think and God does things differently from the way human beings do them.  We see the most dramatic example of just how differently God thinks in today’s feast of Christ the King.  Christ our King is presented to us, stripped and naked on a cross, dying in agony between two common criminals, spit running down his face, a sarcastic note nailed above his head, a “crown” of thorns mockingly hammered into the blood-matted hair of his head for all passers-by to laugh at!  Now that’s not exactly how we picture royalty! We are used to seeing kings powerful, pampered and pompous!  Our King is different, very different!  “He bore our infirmities.  He endured our sufferings. He was pierced for our offenses. He was crushed for our sins.”

Showing up as this kind of “king” is so typical of God.  He has always done this kind of shocking thing!  Centuries ago, when God began to prepare a people from whom he would send a savior, he chose Abraham and Sara, two childless senior citizens ready for the grave!  After choosing this people as "his" people, they end up enslaved in a foreign country.  Even when they are led out of slavery, God picks a man with a speech impediment to lead them. Even his messengers, the prophets, were, more often than not, hesitant, even whiny, sometimes. One had a dirty mouth. One tried to beg off as being too young and inexperienced. Another tried to run and had to be swallowed and spit out on the beach and told to go Nineveh. Their most famous and beloved king, David, was a murderous bigamist!  Even when the birth of the Savior of the world came, he was born not from among the rich and educated, not at a state-of-the-arts birthing center with the best of doctors, but in a barn, to an unknown teen-ager, pregnant before marriage, away from home, after riding for miles on donkey back! God just keeps going and going!  Even before Jesus’ birth, Mary predicted that God’s ways would not be our ways. “The rich will be pulled from their thrones and the poor will be lifted up from their manure heaps.”

Again, in his ministry, we see that God’s ways are not our ways. Jesus was a layman, not a clergyman. He was kicked out of the synagogue, rejected and hounded by the religious establishment. His closest companions were a personnel department’s nightmare: a hated tax collector, a liar, two mama’s babies, an agnostic, a former terrorist, and a petty thief, to name a few!  His closest friends were a motley collection of marginal types: prostitutes, lepers, the un-churched, women and children, the dirt poor, the least, the lost and the losers. The gossip about him was that he “welcomed sinners and ate with them,” helping him earn the nick names of “glutton and drunkard.”  That’s certainly not what most people expect of God! Even his final “big entry” into Jerusalem was not in a gleaming chariot with white horses or on a golden throne carried by slaves. No, he deliberately makes his big entery riding on the back of a jackass!

No wonder most people missed this king. They were looking in the wrong direction. They thought they knew how God would act. They thought he would act as they would act.  As one preacher put it years ago, “In the beginning, God created us in his own image and likeness and ever since we have been trying to create God in our own image and likeness!” Instead of thinking as God thinks, we try to make God think the way we think. No wonder we experience God as absent, more than present, in our lives! We keep trying to make God reasonable, we keep looking for God among the rich, the beautiful, the self-righteous and the powerful!  No wonder Christianity is dead in countries where power, prestige and money are prized, but alive and well and growing in countries where the poor, the powerless and the suffering live. The latter understand how God thinks!  The former is still trying to get God to think as they think! The rich and powerful and beautiful and so-called smart people think they can do without God. The poor and powerless know that they need God! 

One the most common ways we do not think as God thinks is when we think that God is absent when things go wrong and present only when things go right.  Looking back over my own life, I can say with confidence that it was during those times that God seemed most absent is when God was actually most active! I could not see it at the time, but it is crystal clear from hindsight! (1) As I look back over my life, especially over a very painful childhood lived out in an atmosphere of almost daily psychological abuse, I am amazed at my own survival. It was painful and I would not want to go through it again, but I have come to realize that God was certainly using it to prepare me for helping hundreds of others as a priest, especially the marginalized, the rejected and left-out.  I can say with certainty that that experience, and the triumph over it, has helped my effectiveness as a priest in helping them more than any other thing! (2) When I was sent to the home missions right after ordination, I certainly felt at the time that God seemed to have abandoned me. In reality, looking back, God was extremely active at that time in my life. God was preparing me for my life’s work as a preacher, as a "revitalizer" of parishes and as a person sensitive to religious prejudice. Looking back, I have realized over and over again, that that period of my life was preparing me for what I have been doing ever since!

On this Feast of Christ the King, a feast in honor of the king that is the reverse of how we think of kings, we are challenged to think differently about God. It’s message is simple: God’s ways are not our ways, it is precisely when we feel God most absent, is when God is most present! So I say to all of you who have things going on in your life that you don’t like, things that make you feel that God is absent, just wait! Trust God! I believe that you will someday realize that, even in times of loss and tragedy, God is very active.  Scriptures tell the story in a million ways: God’s ways are not our ways! Contrary to popular opinion, breakdown is a sure sign of a breakthrough, there is a crown on the other side of every cross, resurrection on the other side of death!   That heart attack may just wake you up to what’s really important! That relationship breakup may be the best thing that ever happened to you! That firing may just take you to the best job you ever had! That unexpected death may bring you closer to others!  Ugly ducklings today may just turn out to be swans tomorrow! Getting what you want may turn out to be your worst nightmare! That child that disappointed you most may just turn out to be the child that makes you most proud! That feeling of God being absent, may be the beginning of feeling closer to God than ever! Never ever underestimate the value of a so-called tragedy!  God’s ways are not our ways!    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BOTTOM LINE

 

You shall love God with all your heart, with al your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.  

Mark 12:28b-34

Human beings have a way of complicating things. This is definitely true when it comes to religion. I like to compare organized religion to a beautiful antique table that has been covered with an accumulation of layers and layers of old paint that need to be stripped to recover its original beauty. 

Incapable of seeing that its real beauty has become invisible to the eye, some people tend to throw religion on the trash heap as worthless. Not being able to see the priceless antique below the old layers of paint, they put it in a yard sale and let it go for a $1.00 when, if they took it to Antique Roadshow, it would be appraised for millions of dollars. 

This was just as true of religion in Jesus’ day, as it is in our own day. Originally the lives of Jewish people had been guided by the Ten Commandments, but over time those ten commandments had been re-fined and de-fined into hundreds and hundreds of sub-rules and sub-categories until a simple religion of the heart had become so complicated and burdensome that an average person, who wanted to do the right thing, needed religious lawyers to help them find their way through it. What had started out as a simple set of guidelines for moral living had become, over time, a burdensome legalistic nightmare.

It is in this climate that a scholar of the law asks his question. “Of the hundreds and hundreds of religious laws on the books, which is the greatest?” The question he was asking Jesus was, in reality, “What is the bottom line?”

Jesus cuts through the accumulation of rules and regulations. He reduces the Ten Commandments to two, saying if you keep these two, you will have kept the whole law and the teaching of the prophets. What Jesus said was this: (1) if you love God with your whole heart, soul and mind, you will keep commandments one, two and three, serving God alone and no other, respecting his name and worshiping him regularly with the faith community; and (2) if you love your neighbor as yourself, you will keep commandments four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten: honoring your parents, not killing others, not committing adultery, not stealing what belongs to others, not lying, not lusting after other people’s relationships and not coveting what belongs to others. If you really keep these two commandments, loving God and loving your neighbor, you have kept the whole law and every part of it. 

This is the bottom line! This is the heart and essence of true religion! This is what really counts! Dedicate yourself to doing these things with your whole heart, soul and mind and you will be doing all that God asks of you! 

But there has always been a tendency for people to try to be religious without giving God their whole heart, mind and soul. When we do that, we usually seek clarifications about what we have to do and what we can get out of doing and still stay within the law: is this really work, is that really adultery, is this really stealing, what do you mean by keeping the Sabbath holy, is this really killing and what do you mean by honoring one’s parents? When we start down that road, we then end up needing a whole bunch of canon lawyers to help us make sure we don’t have to do any more than we have to!

Let me give you an example, using Commandment Three: “Keeping holy the Lord’s Day.”  A Catholic may ask, “What does that mean?” “How much of the Mass can I miss?” “How late can I arrive and how early can I leave?” Then the search is on for “what is the least I can do and still get by with keeping the Lord's Day!” 

It was this approach to religion that Jesus cut through. For Jesus, true religion was not so much about legal parsing as it was about giving God our whole hearts, souls and minds.  If you do that, you will have kept the rules because the whole purpose of the rules is to guide people toward that whole-hearted love.   

I am worried about the direction religion is taking these days in reaction to all this. In our country, failing to inspire people to change their behavior, many religious leaders are joining forces with politicians to enact laws to force people be good, whether they want to or not. Jesus himself was a victim of this kind of thinking when church and state created a coalition to kill him. Jesus inspired and invited people to turn their lives around. He did not resort to political power to force them to change, no matter how tempting it might have been. He left people free to choose to love God back or to walk away.  Religious enthusiasts' attempts to marry religion and politics is short-sighted and scary. Resorting to politics is a sure sign that they no longer have the ability to inspire and lead.  "Good" shepherds have convincing voices that people want to follow. Their sheep don't need to be "forced" or "driven." 

I am also worried about the direction our own church is taking these days. Faced with the painful reality that our church is no longer inspiring people to be good, there is a scary return to a legalistic approach and doctrinal debates. The last gasp of any dying organization is to come out with a newer and newer edition of the rulebooks. When they lose control of the big issues, they micro-manage the little issues. What people need is a joyful Christianity that is a source of life and hope, one that will light fires of love, self-sacrifice and transformation. That is the vision of Pope Francis. He believes that people want to be good, but they cannot be forced. They must be invited and inspired to that end.   

If people love God with their whole minds, hearts, souls and strength, and their neighbors as themselves, they don’t need a lot of laws. If they do not love God with their whole minds, hearts, souls and strength, and their neighbors as themselves, a million new laws won’t help!

HOW MUCH DO YOU REALLY WANT IT?

He shouted even louder, “I want to see!”

                                           Mark 10:51

 

I love this man named Bartimeus! He is a man who knows what he wants and is willing to jump any hurdles in his way to get at it! No wimpishly sitting back and wishing and waiting and whining for what he needs, he is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he needs! No hoping to be noticed! He makes sure he is noticed! Nobody’s “sit down and shut up” is going to stop him! For him it’s “jump up, shout and be sure you’re heard.” He is tired of being blind. He desperately wants to see! He has a burning faith in Jesus and he will not be held back either by his own reluctance or the obstacles others throw in front of him! 

It is important to notice the words of Jesus here! These same words are often used in the miracle stories of the gospels. Jesus does not say, “Go I have healed you!” Rather he says to Bartimeus, “Go your faith has healed you!” In fact, there are failed healing stories in the gospel where Jesus could not work any miracles because of a person’s lack of faith.  It takes two for a miracle healing – the power of God and the faith of the one who asks for healing. 

The one necessary ingredient, then, in all healing miracles is the strong belief that healing is possible. This strong faith triggers an abnormal acceleration of natural healing processes. This is true of all the healing shrines in all religions – it is the firm faith of the believer that unleashes God’s healing power. 

Bartimeus can teach us something. Psalm 119 says, “God hates half-heartedness!” Very often we are ambivalent about what we say we want. Often, we hang onto our infirmities and losses because they give us convenient excuses for not getting on in life and doing the hard things involved in making it work. We say we want things to be different, but in reality, we are not so sure! Often we actually do not want things to change all that much. 

I am sure Batimeus thought twice about whether he really wanted to see because he knew that when he was able to see he had to quit feeling sorry for himself, he had to give up depending on alms as a beggar and had to get a job for the first time in his life!

Some people wallow in grief for years over the loss of a spouse and feel that they cannot go on. They say they would like to get over it, but sometimes in reality, they are scared of having to do the changing they would have to do to build a new life, another life, a scary new life on their own! It’s often safer to stay stuck than to change! Many unhappy people that I run into as a priest will say they want their lives to be different, but in reality they really don’t want it all that much! In truth, it’s easier for them to to stay stuck! Bartimeus could teach them a lot today about getting up from their self-pity and get on with living! Yes, it is damned hard to move past grief, but the alternatives to moving on are even harder! 

Miracles are possible in our lives, but miracles are different from magic! Magic is about sitting around wishing somebody else would make things happen to make us all better. Magic is waiting for a fairy godmother to come and wave her magic wand over us so we don’t have to do anything. For a miracle to happen, like Bartimeus, we have to get up, throw away the security blankets that we have wrapped ourselves in and be clear about what we want and be willing to go get it! We have to override the naysayer in our own heads and the naysayers who line to roads of our life. Wishing and magic waits for others to fix us. Really wanting something make us take action. God is willing to help those who are willing to help themselves.  Yes, we need to help the helpless, but we also need to encourage those who can help themselves to help themselves!

Friends! We can begin to work miracles in own lives by really wanting something different and really believing that what we want is possible, like Bartimeus. As Dale Carnegie once wrote, “Believe that you will succeed…believe it firmly and you will do what is necessary to bring it to success.”  Jesus it put it this way to Bartimeus, “Your faith has healed you!”