PRAYER: EIGHT PRACTICAL QUESTIONS

 

Suppose you set aside 10 minutes a day...to sit down in a quiet spot....to breathe deeply....to be still....to know that God is near at hand....by your side....in your heart....

 

What would be the best time of day for you to spend these 10 minutes?

In the morning? Midday? In the evening?

 

What might be the best place for you to find some peace and quiet?

At home? At work? In a church or chapel? Outdoors?

 

How will you begin?

Make the sign of the cross....relax and remember that God is with you.... ask God to help you to pray....

be at peace with however the 10 minutes might pass....

and remember that tomorrow is another day to pray....

 

How might you spend these 10 minutes?

In silence....with the scriptures....

resting in the silence, in the presence of God....

speaking from your heart to the Lord's heart....

 

What might you pray?

Tell the Lord what's in your heart and on mind....

speak to him as you would to your best friend....

pray by listening....

 

How might you use the scriptures?

Read until you find something that hits you....

read it again, and again, and again until you know it....

speak it aloud or pray it silently, letting it sink in....

let it become part of your prayer....

ask the Lord to bring it back to your attention through the day....

 

What might you expect?

Peace and quiet....time alone with the Loird....

the consolatidon of God's presence....

a word.... a prayer to carry you through the day....

 

How will you end your 10 minutes?

Thank the Lord for this time with him....

pledge to return tomorrow....

pray the Our Father....

make the sign of he Cross....

 10 minutes is a good way to begin. It's a modest goal out of a day of 1,440 minutes. If you want to spend more time in prayer, spend more time in prayer....

(To be continued....)

 

PASTOR EMERITUS

 

THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER

Prayer is about personal and intimhate relating to God here and now. How I do it will depend on the kind of person I am. I doubt very much if any two people pray in the same way. Some people are more comfortable with formal prayers like the Our Father while others identify more easily with spontaneous prayer from the heart. Most people will need a bit of both kinds of prayer. There's no right or wrong way, no one way better than another. Prayer is perhaps the most personal and subjective thing we do as believers. 

 Authentic prayer requires giving full attention to God; "the raising of the mind and heart to God" as an ancient definition of prayer goes. It involves making a clear decision to put aside other preoccupations while at prayer - personal, family or business issues that otherwise engross and demand attention. To do this is not easy and calls for daily practice. I find it helpful to begin by reading something from scripture, especially the gospel, as a way into the realm of prayer. That has a way of getting my attention and putting me on the right track.

 The time I give to prayer is key. In a busy world, time is gold. To give significant time to God says something about what's important to me. To give half an hour daily to aerobics, to keeping healthy, it means I deeply value my health and the gift of life. The amount of time I give to prayer indicates the importance my relationship to God is.

 A half century of struggling to pray - of helping others to pray, of thinking and talking about prayer - has convinced me that prayer is not so much an initiative on my part as a response to something that's already happening to me. For many years I viewed prayer as my own doing - something I did every day so as to stay on the straight and narrow and have a sense of peace.  Gradually, I came to see prayer as my spontaneous response to the awareness that God continually creates me, loves me into life. That insight came as the result of some good spiritual reading and theological reflection, and has made praying more meaningful. 

 Busy as our world is, and busy as most of us are every day, we need to be aware of God's whispering voice, "Be still and know that I am God!" - Psalm 46.  Prayer is enkindled by awareness and sensitivity. It will take a minute or two to quieten down, center oneself and muse in some way on God's presence. It can happen as I walk by the ocean and gaze upon its vastness, listen to the breakers on the beach, or look at someone playing with a dog. All can be prayer if I'm aware of God's presence as I take in these experiences.

 Prayer is not meant to be spiritual or psychological entertainment. Much of it is a struggle - both to stay focused, and to persevere day after day. Prayer needs to be supported by a sincere moral life. The two go together and are parts of a larger whole. Some of the struggle with prayer may be due to something amiss in my life: a refusal to forgive someone, a grudge or jealousy that's nursed and nurtured, serious lying or dishonesty, uncharitable talk..... Sometimes the experience of dryness and boredom during prayer may be the work of the Spirit leading us to a deeper form of prayer.    (To be continued.....)

PASTOR EMERITUS

 

 

A Shifting Worldview

We've all heard and read about the Vietnam boat people of the seventies, and the Cuban boat people of the last twenty or so years. Most of us have not heard of the Lampadusa boat people fleeing the so-called Arab Spring, mainly Libya. Pope Francis drew the world's attention to this migrant phenomenon last week when he visited the tiny island of Lampadusa, Italy's most southerly territory off the southern coast of Sicily. You can check the details on Rocco Palmo's blog "Whispers in the Loggia."

According to a Reuters report, "dozens of boats carrying hundreds and even thousands of people were arriving in Lampadusa every day...." "Shortly before the pope arrived, a boat carrying 165 migrants from Mali pulled into port...and on the previous day120 people including four pregnant women were rescued at sea after their boat broke down seven miles offshore." "On several occasions at the height of the crisis, the island's normal population of 5,000 was outnumbered by migrants waiting at the port side to be transferred to Sicily or mainland Italy."

This pope's daily expressions of solidarity with the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, the immigrant, and the stranger amount to an ostensible shift in the papal worldview. The pre-Vatican II church tended to preach only to the choir. Vatican II called on all the followers of Christ to make their own "the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish" of all people. The church made a move from being a sacristy or choir church to being a church for the whole world. This disturbed traditionalists at the time who, over the past two decades, found themselves again gaining some muscle in the church. Francis is putting new life into Vatican II again, heeding what liberation theologians like Gutierrez an Sobrino have said for decades: the church of the poor IS the church!

Here's an example from Pope Francis' homily at his Mass on the waterfront at Lampadusa of what I feel is an historic shift in papal outlook. "Today, no one in the world feels responsible for this...We feel at peace with it, we feel fine! The culture of well-being that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others and makes us live in soap bubbles that are beautiful, are nothing but transient illusions that engender in us an indifference to others that has morphed into a whole globalization of indifference." 

This critique of globalization rooted in faith, in scripture, in tradition, is striking. Those who unthinkingly participate in institutions and systems of commerce, if only by proxy and not directly, are responsible. We are responsible to some extent for the plight of others, for the enslavement of the majority of the world. Maybe the new missal should have us say at the end of Mass, "Go and weep," rather than "Go in peace!" The pope asked in Lampadusa, "Who in today's world has wept"

Maybe tears were not far from Martha when, in this Sunday's gospel, she cried out to Jesus that she needed her sister's help in the kitchen. Maybe we all need to listen like Mary to the cry of the poor coming to us through the word of God. Francis questions the indifference of our age with conscience rattling words: "the globalization of indifference" in a "culture of well being."  This new papal worldview must become a necessary lens to interpret for us today the Gospel of the Lord.

PASTOR EMERITUS    

Compassion and Integrity

The parable of the good Samaritan is one of Jesus' all-time greats. You know the story: a traveler on a lonely road gets mugged and left for dead, and two respectable religious people ignore him, while a social outcast comes to his aid in a very generous way and sees to it that he is nurtured back to health.

The temple priest was the first to come by, but he kept going. He did so because he was obliged to keep the Mosaic law and not become "unclean" by getting to within thirty paces of someone who appeared to him to be dead. To become unclean would have barred him from performing his temple duties for several days and earning the sacrificial stipends involved in performing animal sacrifices for the people.Temple priests were well off financially because of the unending lines of people who needed sin offerngs and such to be made in the temple. Nothing wrong with this. All legit and above board.

This priest was justified in the eyes of the law and society in deciding not to risk his job by becoming ritually unclean. He did the sensible thing. He observed the law and didn't lose the respect of his peers and community. What you have here is a good man who is following the rules, and Jesus comes along and says, "There may be another way to measure your conduct."

This kind of thing happens all the time in business. Decisions that are good for the bottom line are sometimes bad for the welfare of human beings. Bosses faced with these kinds of situations are caught in a dilemma and often find themselves making the decision that's sensible for business, and then looking the other way as regards human welfare.

Jesus raises the moral question: Are good business and sensibleness the only measurements? To be compassionate often doesn't make good economic sense. Neither do the beatitudes nor the brand of love revealed by Jesus make worldly sense.

Next we have another good guy, a Levite temple worker. He would have noticed that the priest, his boss, didn't stop. His attitude was, "If the priest didn't stop, why should I?" His tactic was to go along with the judgment of the priest, someone who knew better. Culturally he would have found it inconceivable to make a different decision, as if to correct his boss.

This attitude came to light during the revelations around the clergy scandals, when monsignors and other priests in charge looked the other way and said, "Let the bishop deal with it; I'm not the bishop.If it's OK with him, it's OK with me."

When someone in authority makes a decision, the attitude of the underlings is to just follow orders. This parable challenges the employee to check the moral content of orders from above and, if there's something unethical, to bring the matter to a supervisor's attention. The Nazi holocaust happened because people said, "I was only following orders."

The scholar of the law who questioned Jesus reluctantly admitted that the Samaritan was the good guy; he was "neighbor" to the victim. But his legal mind said the priest and Levite were right. As far as they went, they were right. But Jesus proposed that we go farther; that compassion comes before law and integrity before authority.

PASTOR EMERITUS

Called To Heal

 This Sunday's gospel shows Jesus appointing "seventy-two others" and sending them out to spread peace and tell the world the kingdom of God has arrived. Luke is the only gospel writer to mention "seventy-two;" the other writers speak of twelve. There's a unique significance in this.

In the book of Genesis, Noah's descendants numbered seventy-two. And the Bible says that after the flood seventy-two people started to spread all over the earth. I like to think that the "seventy-two" symbolizes every living person, and that Luke is saying everybody - not just apostles and missionaries - is charged to work for peace and acknowledge the reality of God's kingdom.

Luke, a non-Jew, was all about getting God into non-Jewish areas of life. I grew up with God imprisoned in the Catholic Church. After Vatican II, people began to find God outside Catholicism, as the ecumenical movement and, later, the inter-faith movement developed. Now that Pope Francis is calling on us to look beyond the boundaries of church and religion, I am wondering if he time has come to start replacing the God of religion with the God of life.

Like the seventy-two, all of us are empowered to bring healing and peace to our world. Our baptism tells us as much. Luke's priorities for the seventy-two is to address the healing of the sick first, and then proclaim the kingdom.

How do we bring healing, shalom, wholeness to those who are sick, broken and abused? People need to be listened to, especially those who are sick and depressed. My own pastoral experience tells me that people who are not in a condition to help themselves gladly accept the help of prayer from others. There are times when people are too sick to pray.

To "cure the sick" is something we all can accomplish up to a point by listening to their stories ("Tell me about it") and offering them our prayers and inviting others to pray for them. By offering the sick the opportunity to tell their story helps to keep them going and gives them a measure of hope. By promising them our prayers and the prayers of the parish community we are offering them the powerful prayer of the Body of Christ. The late Cardinal Bernardine used to encourage people to "Pray now while you are healthy; it is not always easy to pray when you are sick."

PASTOR EMERITUS

A PEOPLE'S POPE

 Like many, I've become a Francis watcher. He is different, a breath of fresh air - low-brow, with a new way of being pope. Noteworthy was the advice he gave the leadership of a group of South American nuns recently, telling them "not to worry" should they get a letter of complaint from the Vatican. "Just answer it to the best of your ability and don't worry," he said over coffee. "Then get on with your ministry of bringing light where there's darkness...." This was pastoral and very different from the Vatican's response to their sisters in the U.S. last year.

We've been living in a fear-ridden church for too long. Clergy and religious are afraid of speaking their minds on complicated issues, and nervous about proposing practical solutions to new pastoral and social problems. I am supposed to fear God, and I do. I am not supposed to fear the the bishop or the Vatican, but I do. This is unhealthy, but it's an attitude that the Vatican, chanceries and bishops foster.

Self-appointed watchdogs in the pews have capitalized on this situation by complaining to higher-ups in the church when a preacher or teacher says something they don't want to hear. The result has always been a crackdown on the "offender," without him or her being given an opportunity to meet their accuser. Undue secrecy is alive and well in the church. But all it does is foster a kind of death.

Francis gives the impression that change may be on the way.I had always thought that Jesus wanted to establish a community without fear. "Fear not" is a constant refrain you'll find on the lips of both Jesus and Paul in the New Testament. Jesus' whole life and ministry were about compassion, mercy, forgiveness and love. A quick reading of John's letters gives the clear message that love is supposed to outweigh fear among the followers of Jesus - cf. I John 4:7-21.

Only lst week Francis spoke to those charged with recommending candidates for the office of bishop. He said he wanted candidates who were "close to the people, who were known to be fathers and brothers to their people - gentle, patient, merciful, animated by inner simplicity and frugality of life...and not have the psychology of princes of the church." 

We have grown accustomed to mandates from above that alienate clergy and people alike. Hopefully a new church leadership will not be one that scolds those who want to truly dialogue about new ways of applying the gospel and the teachings of the church to the 21st century. We need a leadership that, like Francis, will understand ordinary people and their day to day struggles. 

We will not see change overnight or in the the next one hundred days. TThe world-wide church of nearly two billion souls is like a very large container ship that takes time and a lot of teamwork in order to change direction. Francis is every bit as conservative as his two predecessors, but his style is vastly different. He is pastoral, like your good neighborhood priest. He doesn't appear to be into generating fear, but more into respecting the fraility and real needs of his flock. It appear to me, a retired pastor, that he sees that the church begins with the people and moves upward, rather than the other way around.

PASTOR EMERITUS

Conversion and Discipleship

What a refeshing story we have in this Sunday's gospel. A sinful woman makes her way into an all-male dinner party and, without so much as a 'by your leave,' restores Jesus' drooping spirits! The Pharisee host, Simon, is aghast. No so Jesus. He takes this woman's matronizing attentions in his stride.

In the light of her faith she recognized she had been forgiven. Forgiven everything. This was an insightful faith that set her heart on fire. She recognized who she was in the presence of the Holy One of God. The seventeenth century British poet, Richard Crashaw, once called this compelling woman a 'weeping fire.'

Most of us were told in elementary school that our sins get forgiven when we tell them in confession with a firm purpose of reparation and improvement, and receive absolution from the priest. Perceptions have changed. We don't earn God's forgiveness. It's forever knocking at the door of our hearts. It's for us to open the door and let forgiveness enter.

Jesus came to reveal the gift and grace of God that was in our world from the beginning, but which was more or less inaccessible until he died and rose again for our salvation. Various hints were given. None but the prophets were able to decipher them, and then only in a vague manner. 'He was in the world...but the world did not know him,' John's Gospel reminds us. When he came, Jesus revealed the great mystery of God's compassion and forgiveness which had been hidden from before all ages.

Today we have a story of conversion in action, a response to mercy without measure, fogiveness without limit. The effects of conversion lead her from interloper to supreme dinner guest. She came to where Jesus was dining, rejoiced at his word and poured herself out in loving service. The gospel ends with Jesus moving on and continuing his mission accompanied and supported by women who had been healed of their erstwhile sinful lives.

Every genuine turning to God leads inevitably to service of Christ and the Gospel.  

PASTOR EMERITUS

Living Eucharist

Food attracts people. We're made to connect with one another. 'No man is an island,' said the poet John Donne. Put together our need for food and our need to relate and we end up with something like the Eucharist. It's at the heart of who we are as Christians. Catholics celebrate Mass not only on Sundays but on weekdays as well.

Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" is familiar to most of us. A lesser known composition of his, written to memorialize John F. Kennedy, is called, "Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers." In this, Bernstein took the outline of the Mass and staged it musically and creatively. There comes a moment in the production when the priest takes the sacred vessels from the altar and hurls them to the floor, where they crash and break. A thick curtain of silence falls on the audience, and in a cracking voice he begins to sing, "How easily things get broken...."

Brokenness is central to our celebration of the Eucharist. It's about breaking and mending, breaking and healing, breaking and reconciling. Tragedy and loss and brokenness gather people around this table in the shadow of the One who was broken for us. In his Body broken and his Blood poured out we find solace, healing and a measure of peace.

"Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are," goes a French proverb. In believing that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, there comes the challenge to believe that we are to become that which we eat and drink at Mass. We are to become the true presence of Christ: to be broken for the good of others; to be poured out like wine in outreach to those in need. Like a coin, the communion host has two sides: the mystery of Christ and the mystery of who we are and are challenged to become.

Here's something paradoxical. Many evangelical Christians who preach the necessity of having a real and personal encounter with Jesus Christ as Savior are often less inclined to believe in the presence and action of Christ in the Eucharist. On the other hand, Catholics who believe in the real, personal presence of Christ in the Eucharist are often less inclined to speak of having a personal relationship with Jesus as Savior.

Maybe Bernstein's iconoclasm was meant to express the anomaly in our Sunday Mass observance when he saw Catholics with a diminished sense of of Christ in their lives Monday through Saturday.

PASTOR EMERITUS

God and Us

The NCR released some results today of a survey taken of U.S. priests in the Spring in regard to the New Missal translation. Not surprisingly, almost 60% of those surveyed are unhappy, many of us wanting major surgery to be done on it ASAP.

I find the New Missal cold and impersonal. Many lines fall awkwardly off the lips. For example, my Irish tongue got twisted out of shape during Eastertime trying to say, without hesitation, "to laud you yet more gloriously..." Overall I find this new translation tends to keep God impersonal and at a distance. While there's something to be said for the "otherness" of God, the Missal's prosaic character creates, for me at least, a banal and superficial feel for the great Mystery being celebrated at the Eucharist.

This Sunday the Church celebrates the mystery of God. It is Trinity Sunday. I read one time that any preacher who talks about the Trinity for more than two minutes will begin to preach heresy. That's not because most of us tend toward the heretical, it's because it's just so difficult to speak about the Trinity. Perhaps the only true response to the mystery of God available to us is silence. Human thinking is limited thinking. Human words are limited words. God is unlimited, infinite. Our thoughts and words about God fall infinitely short of what we try to say!

Like many of us, God has three names; Father, Son and Spirit. But even if some folk have four, five or six names, each is but one person while we believe there are three persons in God. Was it Voltaire who said that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere?It's when you begin to try to explain this mystery that you easily get into theological trouble. I prefer to look not at how we name God but at how God names you and me.

The first name God gives each of us is child: son or daughter. Through baptism we share God's own nature, just as a child shares its parents' nature. We are and always will be in God's mind and heart. God cares for us all as a good father would: gently with a strong arm, wisely with compassion, justly with mercy, and with love without fail and without end.

The second name of divine origin given to each of us is sister or brother. If we are all children of the same Father, then we are brothers and sisters of Christ, the Father's first Son. Jesus, our "big brother" laid down his life that his sisters and brothers might have life forever.

The third name God gives us is the most intimate: in the gift of the Holy Spirit God names us, beloved. With a lover's heart, the Spirit desires to dwell within us. Like a soothing balm, the Spirit seeks to protect and heal us, touching us where the pain is greatest, the wounds the deepest, the hurt most hurtful, as a lover would do for the beloved. From deep within us, the Spirit holds our hearts captive to God's love.

As son, as daughter, children of the Father; as sister, as brother, siblings of the Son; as beloved, embraced in the love of the Spirit of God who is shared by Father and Son. The Spirit draws us to the table of the Son to offer praise and thanks to the Father - albeit in the halting language of our newly imposed Missal!

PASTOR EMERITUS

Wind and Fire

Most people you'd meet on the street will tell you the big Christian festivals are Christmas and Easter. No problem. But if you asked them to name three, not two, there would be some puzzlement, faces with question marks, some silence, and maybe a lot of guessing: Ash Wednesday? Palm Sunday? Thanksgiving Day? Mother's Day? Some might even throw in St. Patrick's Day!

Everyone loves Christmas; it's about a baby being born; there are presents under the tree, and 'Santa Claus is coming to town!' Easter is a little different; hard to get hold of somebody coming back to life, but we all love to watch the kiddies hunt for those painted eggs! Yes, we have managed to tame these feasts and turn them into special days for children. No wonder most people remember them.

What about the third major day in the Christian calendar, Pentecost? Anybody out there having all the family for Pentecost dinner? I haven't noticed any Pentecost cards in Hallmark!  But Pentecost is basic, crucial, critical; it's who we are as Church. It's important because it comes from the start of the Church before there were any structures or much organization.

Pentecost celebrates the arrival of the Spirit upon some up-country fishermen who were blundering around making a lot of mistakes, having to be corrected and apologize all the time. There were no buildings, no popes, no cardinals, no canon law, no Vatican, no rosary, no saints, no Mass; ne'er a Monsignor in sight.

The Spirit came not to the externals, not to the structure, because there was none, but to the people. The Spirit came upon unwashed fishermen and peasant carpenters, upon suspect tax collectors and ordinary housewives, upon possible terrorists and people in the margin. The Spirit came and we became Church.  

We became Church and the glue that held us all together were the words of Jesus and the witness of the Spirit. That's the basic thing the Church is all about: core values, people, words of Jesus, and the Spirit to witness and make sense of it all.  

The Spirit came as a wind, strong and driving; a wind you'd have to lean into or be blown over. A wind strong enough to demolish the walls of injustice we tolerate among nations, in our laws, at work, in our families and how we share what we have with those who have less. The driving wind of God's Spirit seeks to strip us of our prejudices, our greed, our arrogance and resentments.  

The wind of the Spirit came to fan the flame of God's presence in us, such that our lives are warmth for those who need it, light for those who seek the truth, healing for the hurt and wounded, and justice for those who are oppressed in any way.

The Spirit came as flaming red tongues of fire: strong enough to light our path in dark times; bright enough to expose our hidden sins and all our denial; warm enough to take the chill from a hardened heart and melt its stubbornness. The Spirit came as a flame of beauty drawing others to share our faith and hope.

The Spirit comes daily blowing in our lives; offering wisdom to correct our foolishness, understanding to curb our stubbornness, right judgment in the face of our bad choices, courage to do and say what we fear doing and saying, knowledge to open our minds and hearts to truth, reverence to help us love what is pure and beautiful, and awe in God's presence. All these gifts blowing in the wind that we might grow in the life of the Spirit!

Have a wild and happy Pentecost!

PASTOR EMERITUS

Can Heaven be Proved?

 People like to tell me about the latest "Near Death Experience" book or movie. I'm usually skeptical. A recent one, called Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander M.D. has been on the best-seller lists for months and somehow got my attention. Published last Fall, this is the personal account of what happened to a neuro-scientist when he contracted a severe form of E-coli meningitis and slipped into a seven-day coma. He claims he went to heaven.

I'm uncomfortable with the title, Proof of Heaven. Coming from a scientist, I was expecting scientific proof, which would have involved a testing of his hypothesis by other scientists. Since there's no evidence of that to be found, the word "proof" is misleading in the title. Despite the title's over-ambitious claim, the book is an interesting read.

Apart from a few recorded experiences of "Near Death Experiences," most people in a coma experience nothing. Dr. Alexander's experience was different from the usual NDEs. He describes a mysterious journey though muddy tunnels to bright fluffy clouds and beings soaring through the skies to joyful sounds that appeal more to the eye than the ear. Very mysterious.

At the high point of this out-of-body experience he learns three things: "You are loved and cherished; you have nothing to fear; there is nothing you can do wrong." Nothing wrong with this uplifting message. For Eben Alexander, it was a life changing experience, something that seared itself in the marrow of his spirit.

Alexander intermingles his own scientific analysis of what happens to the brain in this kind of coma with vivid descriptions of what he experienced in the "beyond." Before his coma, the author was not a believer but a non-practising Episcopalian who went to church with his family at Christmas and Easter. He dismissed "Near Death Experience" accounts as "noise," the hallucinations of a malfunctioning brain. His own NDE was a dramatic spiritual rebirth, a real conversion experience.

There's nothing in the book that denies, impoverishes or belittles anything the Catholic Church teaches about the next life. It offers a vivid and fascinating picture of something Christianity believes: all creation, the universe, has come from God and is sustained by God as a sheer act of love - something to which the Creator is totally committed. 

His experience was not unlike the experience of Christian mystics, such as Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages. Eben Alexander speaks of the immediacy and ultra-realness of his experiences, some of which were not unlike those described by Bernard in his 84th Sermon on the Song of Songs.  Who is to say that God did not reach into Eben Alexander's spirit and offer him something very rare and special? 

Maybe the existence of heaven cannot be scientifically proved. What we appear to have in this little book is a deeply spiritual experience of God.

PASTOR EMERITUS

Nuns and Bishops

 Has Pope Francis opened a new chapter in the LCWR-CDF dust-up? Did the CDF people badger him into giving his blessing to the investigation? Are the Sisters in trouble? Francis was a young Jesuit when John Paul II meddled with the SJs. He must know the LCWR, like the Jesuits, will come out on top.

What's there to prevent the Sisters from calling conferences, maintaining collaboration, or even starting a different organization to accomplish the same end? Will the LCWR dissolve in favor of another reconfiguration? Women religious will still serve parishes, the poor, the sick, and all the other unattractive outposts of the Church they did yesterday and continue to do today.

"A church that does not come out of itself, sooner or later, sickens from the stale air of closed rooms," Pope Francis wrote his brother Argentine bishops and repeated to his fellow cardinals before the conclave that elected him. The Church must always be in the process of "going out,' he said, "and be willing to take risks on the edges...in the service of the most needy." Seems to me our new Pope is urging all of us to go where the real need is - i.e. to where the Sisters have been all this time.

Willing to "take risks on the edges" may be how Francis plans to accomplish the main mission of the Gospel. More an LCWR thing than a CDF thing? Most every Sister I know has her eyes on that target and her heart deep into her ministry. Are some of them flawed, uninformed, blundering, sinful or tinkering with heretical beliefs? Sure. But you can say the same thing about some bishops, priests, layfolk, this parish or that parish, this community or that.... It's the way of the Church.

The investigation has unfairly put the Sisters in a difficult spot. They could just walk away and nobody could stop them. Archbishop Sartain was either the willing volunteer or the sucker for this task. If he pushes the Sisters too hard, they will walk and he will have failed in his first major task as an archbishop.

Are we seeing a new administration in Rome - one that's concerned with looking out, not looking in? Pope Francis can tell the parties in the dispute, "Stop fighting. Settle this, and get on with your work." Let's hope and pray the pope's common sense and grace of office will win out.

PASTOR EMERITUS

Called to Belong

 After preaching about Easter for almost half a century I find myself looking back a bit.... The women who came to the tomb, a puzzled Peter walking away, the apostles hiding in fear, the two on the road, Peter and the A-team gone back fishing. Seems like the Lord's closest didn't get it right away. It took time for it all to sink in...to understand, to believe, to act on what they believed....

Me too. All these years, and the message is still only sinking in, beginning to make itself real in my life. I still don't understand everything about Easter: the dying part, yes; but the rising bit? Maybe it's because I tend to hide from Christ, fearing the light, fearing the cost.... We're into the third week of Easter now and it's time for the Lord to draw me out of the darkness into his light!

I think of the painting of the little white dog gazing into the brass horn of the old fashioned gramophone, listening to 'His Master's Voice'? "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me" says Jesus in the Gospel. He calls us by name: Romeo, Juliet... What's in a name? Maybe everything.

Probably the first thing ever said to us was our name, our mother calling us by name. Our name is more than a label to distinguish us from others: more than "let's call him Richard so neighbors won't mix him up with baby Jimmy next door." It's a summoning us to belong, an invitation to become part of a family, to become human. The call gives us the courage to belong.

Life is about different people inviting us to different levels of aliveness by calling us by name. The people whom we love, our friends and spouses continually call us to become more alive, to more daringly belong. When we love people we love to say their names, we mention them at the drop of a hat. I wonder if all these voices are echoes of the voice of the Good Shepherd summoning us all to follow him to the fullness of humanity and life? - cf. John 10,10.

PASTOR EMERITUS