"Boris Hoffman? You are now a citizen of the United States, so help you God…"
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus sends the Twelve to evangelize the countryside. To evangelize is to proclaim Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. When this kerygma, this paschal mystery, is not at the heart of the project, Christian evangelization effectively disappears, devolving into a summons to bland religiosity or generic spirituality.Video reflection by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers (U.S.C.C.B.): Daily Reflection.
When Jesus crucified and risen is not proclaimed, a beige and unthreatening Catholicism emerges, a thought system that is, at best, an echo of the environing culture. Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, said that the Church has taken its own dynamite and placed it in hermetically sealed containers and sat on the lid.
In a similar vein, Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas commented that the problem with Christianity is not that it is socially conservative or politically liberal but that “it is just too damned dull”! For both Maurin and Hauerwas, what leads to this attenuation is a refusal to preach the dangerous and unnerving news concerning Jesus risen from the dead.
"Get ready for the jubilee,
(Hooray, hooray!)
He'll get three cheers from you and me,
(Hooray, hooray!)
Uncle Sam will prove he's still the champ,
He'll close up shop and break up camp,
And we'll all feel gay
When Johnny comes marching home!
When Johnny comes marching home!
When Johnny comes marching home!
When Johnny comes marching home!"
"Now this nation that I love has fallen under attack,
A mighty sucker punch came flyin' in from somewhere in the back,
Soon as we could see it clearly through our big black eye,
Man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July!
"Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shakin' her fist,
And the eagle will fly and there's gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringin' her bell,
And it'll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you!
Oh, brought to you Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue!…"
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus summons apostles whom he shapes and sends on mission. Priests, through the centuries—from Augustine and Aquinas, to Francis Xavier and John Henry Newman, to John Paul II—are the descendants of those first friends and apprentices of the Lord. They have been needed in every age, and they are needed today, for the kingdom of heaven must be proclaimed, the poor must be served, God must be worshipped, and the sacraments must be administered.Video reflection by Jem Sullivan, Ph.D. (U.S.C.C.B.): Daily Reflection.
Spiritual fathers are required especially in our time, when a rising tide of secularism threatens to overwhelm the religious impulse. We are wired for God; we will never satisfy the deepest longing of our hearts apart from God.
The secularist ideology teaches that sufficient amounts of wealth, pleasure, power, or honor will make us happy. Who will counter this? Who will speak to this culture of the beauty of God? Who will remind us that our lives are not about us? Who will break open the words of the gospel and spread out the banquet table of Christ’s body and blood? This is why we need priests.
Friends, today the Lord directs his disciples to ask the Father to send laborers for the work of evangelization. The Christian life is lived in between these two imperatives: conversion and mission.Video reflection by Deacon Arthur L. Miller (U.S.C.C.B.): Daily Reflection.
Having been seized by the beauty of revelation, our only proper response is a change of life and a commitment to become a missionary on behalf of what we have seen. In the scriptural tradition, no vision or experience of God is ever given simply for the edification of the visionary; rather, it is given for the sake of mission. No biblical figure is ever given an experience of God without receiving a commission.
Moses spies the burning bush, hears the sacred name of Yahweh, and is then told to go back to Egypt to liberate his people; Isaiah enjoys a mystical encounter with God amid the splendor of the temple liturgy and is then sent to preach; Saul is overwhelmed by the luminosity of the risen Jesus and is subsequently called to apostleship. As theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says, “The beautiful stops the viewer in his tracks and then plants within him a desire to speak to others of what he has seen.”
"I've been everywhere, man,
I've been everywhere, man,
Crossed the desert's bare, man,
I've breathed the mountain air, man,
Of travel I've a-had my share, man,
I've been everywhere…"
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus demonstrates his miraculous power to heal the sick and raise the dead. He cured a woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years who came up behind him and touched the tassel on his cloak. And he took the hand of the official’s daughter and raised her from the sleep of death.Video reflection by Monsignor James Vlaun (U.S.C.C.B.): Daily Reflection.
Christianity is, first and foremost, a religion of the concrete and not the abstract. It takes its power not from a general religious consciousness, not from an ethical conviction, not from a comfortable abstraction, but from the person of Jesus Christ.
It is Christ—in his uncompromising call to repentance, his unforgettable gestures of healing, his unique and disturbing praxis of forgiveness, his provocative nonviolence, and especially his movement from godforsaken death to shalom-radiating resurrection—who moves the believer to change of life and gift of self.
And it is the unique Christ—depicted vividly in the poetry of Dante, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the sermons of Augustine, the stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle, and the sacred ballet of the liturgy—who speaks transformatively to hearts and souls across the Christian centuries.
"Country roads, take me home,
To the place where I belong…"
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks about his relationship to the Father. Jesus, the Son, was sent by his Father in love. Thus there is in God a play of lover and beloved. But the lover and beloved are connected by the love they have in common. Therefore the God disclosed in Jesus is a family or community of persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.Video reflection by Father Greg Friedman, O.F.M. (U.S.C.C.B.): Sunday Reflection.
The ground of being is a communio of being and letting-be. From all eternity, the Father forgets about himself in love and generates the Son; and from all eternity, the Son forgets about himself and looks to the Father; and the mutual love of Father and Son is the Holy Spirit.
Active generation, passive generation; active spiration, passive spiration. Breathing in and breathing out; being and letting-be. God is like a set of lungs, or like a heart—taking in and letting out, a rhythm, a cadence, a back-and-forth of love.
This true God is one who does not insist on hoarding power or defining himself over-and-against. This true God is love, is a communion, a sharing, a family.
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the parable of new wine and old and new wineskins.Saint Quote o' the Day
The new wine is the Good News, the Incarnation, the reconciliation of the divine and the human. But this powerful elixir cannot be contained in the receptacles of the old consciousness. As long as the ego reigns in the soul, the new wine will prove too strange, too foreign, too threatening—and it will be accordingly rejected.
Before the heady wine of the Gospel can be assimilated, there must be a scouring out of the spirit, a transformation of awareness and attitude, a metanoia. We should examine the stories of Jesus’s confrontations with the demons from this perspective. The demon within us realizes that he is the old wineskin that will be shredded by the inpouring of the new wine, and he consequently reacts in horror.
It is a helpful spiritual exercise to isolate those passages from the New Testament, those sayings and actions of Jesus, that make us most uncomfortable, since they will most effectively indicate how our souls have to be transfigured. They, much more than the passages we instinctively love, will show the path that metanoia must follow.
"Jesus comes to me every morning in Communion, & I return the visit by going to serve the poor."
—Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassatti, T.O.P. (1901-1925, feast: 4 July)
"Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having ghe right to do what we ought."
—Pope Saint John Paul II the Great (1920-2005, r. 1978-2005; feast: 22 October)
"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,Happy two hundred fiftieth birthday, America!
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?…"
Friends, today’s Gospel tells of Thomas’s doubting the Resurrection. Indeed, Catholicism has a rich tradition of questioning, seeking understanding. Aquinas, another great St. Thomas, spent much of his life asking and answering hard questions about the faith.Video reflection by Deacon Arthur L. Miller (U.S.C.C.B.): Festal Reflection.
Do you remember Hamlet’s great line, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”? If we stubbornly said—even in the area of science—that we will accept only what we can clearly see and touch and control, we wouldn’t know much about reality.
There is, in most areas of life, a play between knowing and believing. It is not unique to the religious sphere of life. Blaise Pascal summed it up: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not.”
It is not that we who have not seen and have believed are settling for a poor substitute for vision. No, we are being described as blessed, more blessed than Thomas. God is doing all sorts of things that we cannot see, measure, control, fully understand. But it is an informed faith that allows one to fall in love with such a God.
Friends, in today’s Gospel, the Lord heals a paralytic after first forgiving his sins. Jesus’s initial words to this paralyzed man are, “Your sins are forgiven.” Why does God forgive our sins? Because he wants us alive, he wants us moving, he wants us in action, realizing what we can be.Video reflection by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers (U.S.C.C.B.): Daily Reflection.
Jesus comes to liberate us for deeper life, to open a new future to us. Sin is a refusal to live according to God’s purposes and desires. Our obsession with past sins paralyzes us. God is opposed to this obsession with the past because it renders us unable to move.
I can brood over my past sins to such a degree that I become finally paralyzed, unable to move. “Your sins are forgiven” is another way of saying, “Don’t be paralyzed by sins that you undoubtedly worry about far more than God does.”
After saying his sins are forgiven, Jesus says, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.” That’s the way it works. First comes the forgiveness of sins, and that is a liberating power in us. Now I can live for the future.
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus drives demons out of two possessed persons. Notice that the demons always know who Jesus is. The demonic voice stands for the sinful structure of consciousness; it is the mouthpiece for a soul dominated by the fearful ego.Video reflection by Jem Sullivan, Ph.D. (U.S.C.C.B.): Daily Reflection.
When the New Being appears, when the new consciousness emerges in the person of Jesus, it is precisely this demonic power that most clearly recognizes it, just as a threatened animal is most acutely aware of the approach of the predator. The ego-dominated psyche knows intuitively what the onset of Jesus means: “What have you to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the appointed time?”
What is important for us spiritually is to listen with great attentiveness to these inner voices of protest, to these demons within us, for they will, paradoxically, facilitate the assimilation of the Christ, showing us clearly where we have to be changed.
"Always go forward & never turn back."
—Saint Junípero Serra, O.F.M. (1713-1784, feast: 1 July)
