“Vital and advances environmental goals”

Catholic Energies, based in Washington, D.C., helps organizations use solar power. A recent initiative will allow Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington to earn “enough energy credits to offset the electricity costs of 12 of its properties across the District.” 

 Apart from their faith-driven funding, the solar panels are unusual in another way. They will sit atop a “pollinator meadow” of 650,000 nectar-bearing, flowering plants including black-eyed Susans, orange coneflowers and milkweed. The meadow is meant to reinvigorate local bee and butterfly populations. Source: The Washington Post. 

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Wiki-image by David Monniaux Solar Panel CC BY-SA 3.0

Daily word, 25 Jul 19

St. James, Apostle (25 Jul 2019)

2Co 4. 7-15; Ps 125; Mt 20. 20-28

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J., 8-day directed retreat

Portals of Power

Ambition is a slippery attitude. Without drive we don’t get up in the morning; without aspiration we achieve little, if anything. Things become slippery as we notice others aiming high and especially nearing or attaining success. It seemed no different for 10 apostles noticing James and his brother John.

The sons of Zebedee left everything to follow Jesus.¹ Jesus entrusted himself to them. Aware of the shocking way his life and ministry would end, Jesus took James, John and Peter and was transfigured before them.² Did the brothers misconstrue the brightness on that mountain as kudos they had won for following Jesus?

Perhaps they had. They once wanted to rest in that brightness forever: to sit, one at [Jesus’] right hand and one at [his] left, in his kingdom. Their attitude lit a fire of indignation under their colleagues. Jesus measured healthy drive and aspiration differently. Jesus was their measure.

Were they ambitious—grasping and striving rather than straining toward a goal? Perhaps; yet no one could call the Zebedee boys disloyal. Jesus named them well, sons of Thunder.³ They felt they could command it and more. When Samaritans blocked Jesus’ way to Jerusalem through their territory James and his brother wanted to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them if Jesus would let them. Elijah had done it⁴; why not them? Anything for their Rabbi.

James and his brother did give all in witness to Christ. They learned the way of witness to Christ is strong but not bombastic; clear but not flashy. They personalized Paul’s experience: “The power is limitless, but it is stored in very unlikely receptacles,” an early 20^th-C commentator expressed it.⁵—like clay pots. I long focused on pots more than clay; I missed that limitless power includes creative power. Witnesses to Christ participate in creating: through our cracks shines the bright creative power of God. Before likening himself and all witnesses to Christ as clay pots Paul had cited Genesis: God who said, “Out of darkness light will shine,”…has shone in our hearts to bring to light the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Christ.⁶

As clay pots are disposable James and his brother were, like Paul, rejected, persecuted. “In them is the paradox of Jesus’ death and resurrection found in a new bodily expression…: “Death is at work in us, but life in you.”⁷

The Christian paradox empowers us not to fear our cracks. Rather, we invite our triune God into them to transform them into portals of life for others. Christ Jesus welcomes us to participate already in the new creation Christ’s risen life is. Christ welcomes us to enjoy it fully after a life of following and learning him as our measure.

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1. Matthew 4.22.
2. Matthew 17.1-13.
3. Mark 3.17.
4. Luke 9.54; 1Kings 18.36-39.
5. A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, Accordance electronic ed. (Altamonte Springs: OakTree Software, 2001), paragraph 4202. Citing Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, (New York: C.Scribner, 1915), 126.
6. 2Corinthians 4.6.
7. Luke Timothy Johnson. The Writings of the New Testament (Kindle Locations 4882-4883). Kindle Edition.

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Wiki-images by: DD from Male, Maldives Light rays filtered from above CC BY-SA 2.0; Will Taylor, Mary Tuthill Lindheim MaryTuthillLindheim-abstract-vessel CC BY-SA 3.0

Daily word, 20 Jul 19

15^th Saturday of the Year (20 Jul 2019)

Ex 12. 37-42; Ps 136; Mt 12. 14-21

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J., 8-day directed retreat

Restored

Originally the painting was known not by title but by its commission: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Over years its varnish darkened. 155 years later its darkness suggested the title by which we know it: “The Night Watch.”¹ This month its restoration begins before the public at the Rijksmuseum and online.² We shall see it as Rembrandt painted it: the militia moving out of a gloomy courtyard into the “full blaze of day”³: a move of liberation from darkness into light. The Christian tradition describes God as Light from light.⁴ Liberation also is life lived in God to any who welcomes it.

God’s liberation of the Hebrews occurred on God’s eternal watch: it was a night of watching by the Eternal, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Eternal by all the people of Israel throughout their generations. In Martin Buber’s phrasing, “the history feast par excellence of the world [is] not a feast of pious remembrance.”⁵ It participates in God’s saving action.

To watch with God is to enjoy God’s mercy and to show it in one’s life. Results of not watching with God can infect even the pious. The Pharisees idolized piety. They watched every action: theirs and everyone’s: was each piously done? That blinded them from watching with God. As a result they suffered feverish envy of Jesus.

The logic of envy is murder: remove the one who possesses honour, respect or wealth I do not. Envy so overwhelmed the Pharisees that they turned to their hated rivals, Herod and his sympathizers,⁶ to rid Jesus from them forever. Watching with God instead of watching out for themselves, their customs and traditions⁷ would have turned them against envy and its hateful action. Watching with God would have filled them with God’s light and  life.

Jesus watched with God and invited his disciples to watch with God. Like other 1^st-Century Mediterraneans Jesus offered models, both ones to follow and to avoid. Desire what God desires, mercy,⁸ Jesus repeated to the religious professionals. To his disciples Jesus said, Watch out, and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.⁹

Watching with God includes discerning. To discern ways God invites us into the “full blaze of [God’s living] day” is to be taught by God. To follow through God teaching us does not idolize piety. To follow through God teaching us keeps vigil for the Eternal and welcomes the Eternal’s enduring mercy. Retreating in God’s mercy allows God to restore us. We begin to know ourselves as God knows us: loved; led; liberated; carried—at every moment.

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1. 10 things you may not know about Rembrandt’s Night Watch hosted by the painting’s home, The Rijksmuseum.
2. Operation Night Watch.
3. Rembrandt and the Nightwatch.
4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 242.
5. W. Gunther Plaut & David E. Stein, eds., The Torah: A Modern Commen-tary, Revised; Accordance electronic ed. (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2006), 425.
6. Matthew 22.16; Mark 3.6.
7. Matthew 15.2, 6.
8. Matthew 9.13; 12.7.
9. Matthew 16.6, 11.

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Wiki-images Night Watch, detail1. PD-US; Evil Counsel PD-US

Daily word, 09 Jul 19

14^th Tuesday of the Year (09 Jul 2019)

Gn 32. 23-33; Ps 17; Mt 9. 32-38

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J., Spiritual Directors Workshop

Names and Power

Names and power were close relatives in the ancient Mediterranean world. Entrusting names to others was never casual: names bestowed power. Even elemental powers had names. These ‘a-b-cs of the universe’ produced effects good or harmful. Those that harmed humans were called demonic powers or spirits.

To release people from demonic harm rabbis first learned demons’ names. Knowing their names empowered rabbis to drive them out from people. Spirits that rendered people mute had an advantage: mute spirits prevented rabbis from learning their names.

This helps us appreciate the brevity of the description of Jesus’ miracle and both kinds of amazement to it. About brevity: Jesus did not need the mute spirit’s name to expel it! About amazement: The Pharisees accused Jesus of being in league with demons because Jesus did what they could not: envy soured their amazement. The crowds recognized Jesus as the one Isaiah had promised: He took our illnesses & carried our diseases.¹

Names also figured large before Jesus. The chro-nicles of Isaac’s twin sons illustrate men and women trapped in the web of unfulfilling human affairs: rivalry; deceit; fear; mistrust; dissatisfying striving. Jacob so feared his brother Esau he fled from him for 20 years. Early in those years God favoured Jacob with a revelation of divine care. Yet Jacob chose to remain self-centred rather than God-centred. His prayer reflected that: If God will be with me, & keep me in this way that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on, so that I come back to my father’s house in peace, then the Eternal shall be my God.²

At the end of his 20-year exile Jacob returned to Esau but first set things right. “The time [had] come to face the past and, in doing so, to secure the future.”³ Jacob remembered the Eternal’s promise to care for him: he had grown less self-centred. ‘Less’ is the key word because from his great wealth Jacob lavished gifts on his brother ahead of their meeting. Jacob had grown willing to surrender every thing; yet he could not surrender himself to God.

At God’s initiative—yet again!—Jacob contended with God and in the process with himself. The no-holds-barred struggle with God won Jacob a new name: Israel, God makes straight⁴; a new life; a new identity. A physical reminder kept Jacob alert to his new identity in God.

How we struggle with God; how we let God free us; offer us new life, even a new identity: all these vary for each of us. God ever offers us new life. As you continue your retreats: don’t be mute in prayer; tell God everything. Surrender your entire self to God. Ask for courage to let God love you to bits; when we do God reassembles us more closely into the individuals God has created us to be.

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1. Matthew 8.17. The citation of Isaiah interprets the miracles in chapters 9-10.
2. Genesis 28.20.
3. W. Gunther Plaut & David E. Stein, eds., The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised; Accordance electronic ed. (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2006), 218.
4. The Torah: A Modern Commentary, 122.

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Wiki-images: Jesus heals one possessed by a mute spirit PD-US; Jacob wrestling with angel PD-US