Bring to this table

Recently I was asked, “What is good about St Edmund’s, your present Jesuit community?” Many things came to mind but our meal times stood out.

The eight of us at St Edmund’s—5 Americans, 1 Zambian, 1 Italian and myself—take turns to cook for one another. That we are a motley group is reflected in the varied meals that have graced our table since the school year began. Each meal has been delicious, often with a national or regional touch. Indeed, it is comforting to come home at the end of a school day to warm food. “God bless the cook,” which John, the liturgist in our community, appends to every grace said sums up our gratitude for these meals—always lovingly cooked, though sometimes, anxiously prepared with more than a dash of hope!

Our dinners are accompanied by lively conversation on topics as varied as the school day, international affairs and television and music. Sometimes, we debate; sometimes, we philosophize. But there is always laughter and good cheer. Yes, I am thankful for the sharing we partake of in each other’s company and life stories.

As I shared this with the Jesuit who posed the question, I realized that what each of us brings to our dinner table is the gift of ourselves, filled as we are with joys and struggles, with lights and darknesses, with a yearning to live as good Jesuits and with humble confession that we sometimes fail.

And isn’t it really ourselves that you and I bring to the Eucharist, the Lord’s table of plenty we gather around daily or weekly? Don’t we gather there as diverse persons who bring the complexities that we each are, the good and happy in our lives, and the painful and difficult too? And who among us wouldn’t dare admit that we also bring the embarrassingly shameful and sinful in our lives? If there is a reason for coming as we do to the Eucharist, it is because we know we will be welcomed and accepted, affirmed and embraced by our God whose love not only forgives us but celebrates our lives, no matter the intricacies or muddleness that they are.

But our gratitude can be more joyful when we recognize that it is first of all God himself who comes to this table to meet us. God comes to meet the hunger of our human need for true companionship, which all our earthly relationships will never fully satisfy. God comes because God simply desires to be with us. That God involves Himself in our everydayness so that He can help us free ourselves more and more from attachments that deny life should tell us of his ever-present concern that we have life to the full.

Because we are human and need to see, hear and touch, God meets us through Jesus, his Son. Whether it is Jesus who was present historically among the Jewish people, or today in our lives, encountering Jesus always leads us into deeper relationship with God.

Wondrous then is God meeting us through Jesus in the Eucharist. Here, Love excelling meets human love so poor and wanting. Wondrous too is God meeting us in the many eucharistic moments when Jesus is present through another’s forgiveness, care and love.

Indeed, some of our most palpable experiences of God are when families celebrate happy times together, when friends walk with each other through pains and hurts, and when religious allow ourselves to be really who we are to one another. In each of these, we experience God’s presence shinning through the gift of ourselves to one another. How can we not take comfort then in our families, friends and confreres, who are also God’s food and wine for our everyday lives?

And so, it might do us good this week to ask ourselves, “What am I grateful for in my relationships with family, friends and confreres? How can I be their daily bread, their daily drink, today?”

photo: dinner by adsj (lisbon, july 2009)

Finding One's Rhythm

“Find your rhythm.” This was one of the first things Brad, our rector at Weston Jesuit Community, invited us newbies to theological study in Boston to do. Transitions, he explained, disrupt our familiar rhythms. Hence, the need to find it again.

In times of transitions our familiar rhythms of life—be it work and study, recreation and prayer, even sleeping and being awake—often go awry. Transitioning to a new place, and familiarizing oneself with new faces and spaces is usually accompanied by great adjustment and adaptation. Some moments can even be confusing and uncomfortable.

It’s been seven weeks since I arrived in Boston. In this my transition time, I’ve been orientated to living in the States and started theology studies. I’ve also been settling into our Jesuit community life, with its attendant responsibilities of communal prayer, cooking and house cleaning. Throughout this period, there have been many moments of getting to know new friends and interacting with them. As with transitions we all make, I have had delightful moments when kindness and hospitality abounded and struggles when loneliness and doubt seized me.

If there is a common thread in all of this, it is finding a new rhythm of living. This has meant finding the best time for daily prayer, as well as silent contemplation once a week at a nearby monastery. It has also been a time of carving out those sacred times to read fiction, to listen to jazz and even to cycle along the Charles River. Identifying and making use of the best times to study and to email home, and the freest evenings to cook for my community, are part of these efforts too. Finding these, I now try to live out as best as I can my new rhythm of life here.

Brad’s advice expresses this truth of human living: having a regular rhythm of life enables us to live balanced, healthy and meaningful lives.

Like many Christians, my efforts to find a rhythm led me to Jesus whose life had a healthy rhythm: times for prayer and times for play; times for ministry and times for rest; times to feast with friends and times for solitude. Indeed, all of us would do well to learn from his way of living that the Gospels record. When we find and live out our own meaningful rhythm of life, we can better live the happier life with God and one another that Jesus’ life modeled for us, and, in this way, help others to find their own rhythm of life too.

The hope I have for all of us this week is to discover our individual rhythms of life and faith. Perhaps, we could begin by asking the Lord for this grace: “Teach me, Jesus, to find a good rhythm to live my life well and fully for You and for others.”

photo: resting by the charles by adsj (cambridge, september 2009)

On This First Day of Autumn

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense,
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, September 21, 1902

The Way We Look

A common activity of these orientation days has been sitting in a circle and introducing ourselves to one and another. We did this as newly arrived Jesuits to Weston Jesuit Community. It was the same when the international students of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College where I am studying met. Most recently, all of us who are beginning the Masters of Divinity course this Fall made a similar round of introductions.

At each of these “getting to know you” sessions, I found myself looking at the others in the room. I looked at my brother Jesuits from around the world, most here to study advanced degrees in Theology. I looked at eager newbies like me to theology from India and Dominica, from Ukraine and South Korea. I looked at my fellow classmates in the Masters of Divinity course—some of us, Jesuits, Redemptorists and Capuchins, preparing for ordination, and the lay faithful, coming to grow in their faith and to be better catechists and religion teachers.

As I looked at these people, I asked myself, who or what am I really looking at?

Am I looking at how different or similar they are to me? Am I looking at another who can be a friend? Or worse, am I screening out possible competitors? Do I see this person like the multitude, and hence, ordinary? Is my gaze fixating him into a role because he appears holy or discriminating her because she smokes and drinks?

Do you, like me, sometimes find yourselves, looking at another only to label him as this or that kind of person?

To be honest, we all do. Our human nature—at times, competitive, at others, discriminatory, and sadly, in some moments, uncharitable—can blur the giftedness of our vision.

Our vision is gift. It is gift because our eyes were made to see another’s goodness, not her shortcomings or his sinfulness, as we are prone to do. If we believe that God created us for a purpose, then our eyes are to help us realize it. For Ignatius of Loyola, we were created to be with God forever. Our eyes can help us recognize the immense good each person brings into the world, as well as the goodness each is. Seeing this reality can help us know God more easily and make our return of love to him more readily.

That our vision can do this should humble us to embrace wholeheartedly its celebratory nature. This expresses itself fully when we can see more clearly and honestly the potential each person has for God, no matter his human failings. Thomas Aquinas wrote that to see something created is to see not just what is before us, but, more importantly, to see that it is destined for God. If we are to be fully human as God created us to be, then, our eyes are to see one another not merely as each is at this moment but for the more and better he can become. Sadly, we struggle with this, as we do with a vocabulary that does not always enable us to speak of each other truly just yet.

Jesus offers us a language to do precisely this, however. His discourse verbalizes God’s compassion, forgiveness and restoration. It is not so much spoken as it is enacted. Where the Pharisees and Scribes were ready to stone the adulterous woman to death, quick to distance themselves from lepers and the sick and cruel in discriminating the lowly shepherds and the marginalized tax collectors, He instead touched, embraced and interacted with them. As persons, no other sensory act reminds us we are valued and valuable than to be touched. Jesus knew this. His actions speak to me of how he looked at each person with the eyes of God.

We can say his way of looking and communicating incarnated God’s Love; it truly recognizes each person for what she is—made in God’s likeness and meant for His eternal embrace.

And so, it will do me good when I sit with my classmates for our first theology class to remember this truth which the Dominican Timothy Radcliffe articulates thus:

So if I am to describe a human being truthfully, it is not enough for me just to describe what is before my eyes. I am reaching out for what cannot be fully told now, what can only be glimpsed at the edge of language. (What is the Point of Being a Christian?)

Dear friend, do Radcliffe’s lines challenge you too to pause, look more carefully and reconsider who the others you look at each day really are?

photo: looking by adsj (paris, july 2009)

Congruence

The Gospel readings earlier this past week challenged me greatly; they invited me to examine honestly the quality of my heart as I minister to the faithful.

In these readings, we encountered Jesus reminding the Pharisees of the need to live lives worthy of their calling as teachers of God’s Law. He strongly challenged them to examine their overzealous insistence on laws and appearances at the expense of mercy and good faith as they ministered to the Jewish faithful. His harshest words were reserved for their hypocrisy, for teaching the Law of God but failing to observe it faithfully in their lives.

Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees is also his encounter with me. Jesus challenges me as one who ministers to God’s people, and more so, as one preparing for the ordained ministry. There are two ways I recognize this challenge. Brad, my rector, articulates one way: am I my brother’s keeper, focused on correcting every error God’s people make, or am I my brother’s brother, called to accompany them by showing them the face of a forgiving God, whose laws are rooted in His Love? A second way I will express this is: am I proclaiming what God announces as his Good News of Peace, Justice and Love in word and deed yet failing to live it as it should be in my personal life?

Indeed, those of us who preach and teach from the pulpit are called, again and again, to an honest examination of the congruence between what we say with our lips and what we do in our lives.

But Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees is meant for all of us who say we are Christians.

Can we preach what we believe as Christians not only in word but in the ways we live it out in our personal lives? This is not so much a spiritual question, as it is fundamentally one regarding the quality of human living. Whether we are parents trying to raise our children in the faith, or teachers whose lives should witness Christian charity and excellence well in schools, or even those who hold public office, this is a question each one of us has to answer before God at the end of each day.

Edith Stein, who as the Carmelite Sr Benedicta of the Cross died for the faith, wrote that the Christian vocation calls each one of us to strive for that moment when we can stand before God as we are, without any label, title or excuse. Perhaps, when Jesus challenged the Pharisees then—as he does us today—He had no other design but to call all of us to live more authentic lives, the kind that will enable us to stand before God, naked as we truly are, because then we would be able to confess that we have helped others’ live God’s love well and that we have lived this love just as well and honestly with God.

photo: embrace by adsj ( at the louvre, paris, july 2009)