Daily word, 22 Aug 19

Memorial of Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary (22 Aug 2019)

Judg 11. 29-39a; Ps 40; Mt 22. 1-14

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

Measuring with God

Mary received word that she would mother the Eternal God into the world. Her child would be an heir to David, Israel’s revered king. In the long tradition of the church the mother-son connection has made Mary, queen-mother—to use a title more familiar to us.

The flow of the scriptures reminds us that no earthly assembly, even with superb leadership, is perfect. Jesus told his parable of the wedding feast to leaders who opposed him. Ongoing response and renewal are the essence of openness to God’s dream for creation. Living in sync with God’s dream for creation is a process; it is not a finished result. Mary lived its process: the way she lived it is our model.

The story of Jephthah’s vow is not our model. We recoil that he carried through and made his daughter a burnt offering. Jephthah’s story is imperfection in capital letters. Vows are sacred words; Jephthah only had his word in his culture of honour and shame. Because we do not inhabit his culture it is difficult to appreciate. Although it cannot satisfy our moral outrage, Jephthah was not without feeling: he tore his clothes [the most striking expression of grief] and said, “Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low, and [by coming outside first]you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the Eternal, and I cannot take back my vow.”

How was it that Jephthah could not take back his vow? It won’t satisfy our moral outrage but it may shed light on him: Jephthah was the son of a prostitute. That defined his future. His half-brothers drove him away, “You shall not have an inheritance in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.” Mighty though he was he left and worthless fellows gathered around him.

The people Israel came to him and his band desperate for help to defend them in war.¹ Though the spirit of the Eternal was on Jephthah he did not know the God who forbade human sacrifice.² When his negotiations to prevent war failed,³ Jephthah made his vow.

Recoil at Jephthah’s decision we do because Christ let us see that the honour-shame measure is not the only measure. Though we imperfectly live our Christian measure, our vocation to interact with others and creation with greater sensitivity, care and compassion, Christ always welcomes us. Welcoming Christ Jesus and his measure is our lifelong process. One never perfectly attains it. Rather, we stretch to let the measure by which God measures be our measure. Open to God’s dream for creation and deepening our relationship with God help us measure with our triune God.

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1. Judges 11.1-7.
2. Leviticus 18.21; Deuteronomy 18.10.
3. Judges 11.12-18.

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Wiki-images by: Chris Light Mary, Mother of Jesus, Trinity Heights. CC BY-SA 4.0

Sunday word, 18 Aug 19

Twentieth Sunday of the Year (18 Aug 2019)
Jer 38. 4-6,8-10; Ps 40; Hb 12. 1-4; Lk 12. 49-53

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

Jesus’ Strategy

Fundraising as well increasing good will succeed often because a benefactor has good reason to lend support. That good reason fundraisers name a case. Cases are stories of people who have been helped by a group or agencies. People who have been helped in their needs concretely aid others to appreciate the work of helping groups and contribute to them.

Risen Christ Jesus, we may say, was the case the apostles used to evangelize. People were moved by the good news of Christ Jesus. Many responded. The evangelist Luke recalled one of those responses: What shall we do?¹ One’s response to the good news of risen Jesus always profits from encouragement. Jesus’ words to the apostles his Spirit speaks to us: I am with you always.² None of us journeys alone. We may ask, In what manner is Jesus with us? The Letter to the Hebrews offered a concrete image: we may call it the marathon case. Like a fundraising case with concrete appeal to benefactors today, early Christians readily responded to the marathon image of Olympic Games.

Olympic contests exemplified persistence, perseverance and endurance virtuous living requires. St. Paul exploited the image in preaching the gospel; the author of the Letter to the Hebrews even more. People responded because Olympic contests shaped their culture; many attended them and breathed their electric atmospheres.

Marathoners still begin far from their goal with few spectators. As runners progress more people cheer them on. They fatigue along the way and  need to draw on their conditioning, their wits, the cheering, their desire to reach the roaring stadium and its reward. Beginning; challenges and discouragements; time passing; endurance; and reward: the race speaks to our living. To one more detail marathoners are alert; it speaks to how Jesus is with us.

Runners are alert to who is with them and how they are running. That knowledge allows them to strategize: keep pace with that one; break away from another; follow that runner during a challenging part of the course. Laying aside every impediment [and distraction], let us run with endurance the race [in which we have been entered³ (at our baptisms)] fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

As we run our life’s race Jesus is running ahead of us! We do not run alone. Jesus runs ahead—pioneer for us. Jesus’ strategy of enduring a cross by  disregarding its shame models endurance, yet it is not easy for us to appreciate. We wear crosses; for us a cross is honourable. In the ancient Mediterranean a cross was the greatest shame: as it ended a life and for the survivors of one who was crucified. Jesus fixed his eyes and heart on God, not human opinion. To keep our eyes…onJesus is our strategy for our run through life. To keep our eyes…on Jesus frees us to be transformed and one day fully enter the living God’s presence as Jesus has.

That is our reward; it was won first by Jesus then countless others: that great cloud of witnesses surrounding us and cheering us on to run as they did. To run the race Jesus and others ran can mean we may be derided and opposed. On retreat we draw on our faith-conditioning, our felt-knowledge and our desire. If our retreats help us feel it is fruitful to run with Jesus and help us know our purpose; if our daily prayer-relationships keep alive our purpose and make Jesus’ strategy to count on the living God our strategy, then we run well. We also enjoy the companionship of our ancestors in faith who have reached the goal; we will hear them cheer us on more readily and often.

  

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1. Acts 2.37. Also Luke 3.10 to John the Baptizer’s invitation to repent.
2. Matthew 28.20. 
3. Hebrews 12.1, The New English Bible translation.

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Wiki-images by: Marcomogollon Athletics pictogram. CC BY-SA 4.0; Tashkoskim Sunlight through smoke CC BY-SA 4.0

Daily word, 08 Aug 19

St. Dominic, Memorial (08 Aug 2019)

Nm 20. 1-13; Ps 95; Mt 16. 13-23

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

“Holy Lives and Practical Charity”

“If he hadn’t taken a trip with his bishop, Dominic would probably have remained within the structure of contemplative life…” so began a brief summary¹ of St. Dominic. A line from the responsorial is apt for the founder of the order of men and women, which bears his name: When you…hear God’s voice: Harden not your hearts.

Impenetrable hearts often have deaf ears for companions. Hard-hearted ones resist reality and the way God works in it. On that “trip with his bishop” Dominic noticed some who lived from a distorted view of reality.

Their trip took them to Spain’s home territory of the Albigensians. They lived a heresy with several earlier incarnations. They considered all material things evil. You can imagine the implications: sacraments, which employ things, were evil; the body, which involves procreation, was evil; so was healthy eating. Their behavior flowed from their belief: the Albigensians did not accept a good God created a world marred by pain and suffering—though God intervened early to free people of oppression and nourish them in their flight; and the son of God suffer[ed] greatly…[was] killed and on the third day…raised. Purists—Albigensians called themselves the Pure—purists in any age uneasily face reality and fret at being real.

St. Dominic wanted to curb and correct this distorted view of God, the world and people. But how? Preachers came and went, but many “traveled with horse and retinues, stayed at the best inns and had servants.”² The Pure, of course, and others rejected them. So Dominic began to move about humbly with three Cistercian monks.

Cistercians, more often called Trappists, empha-sized manual labor to support themselves. Their preaching effort in imitation of the apostles led to the Order of Preachers. Its members seek to keep alive Dominic’s ideal: “to pass on the fruits of contemplation.”³ It is one way to live the vocation of baptismal priesthood by which we witness to Christ⁴ by holy lives and practical charity.⁵

St. Ignatius of Loyola, born 270 years after Dominic had died, was very fond of him. St. Ignatius learned contemplation fuels Christian action. Long before Ignatius and before his contemporaries⁶ coined the phrase “contemplatives in action,” St. Dominic lived it. Many of us feel called to live it, too. Our annual retreats assure us of our triune God’s closeness; through them God invites us to resume our daily routines by living the fruits God offers us. 

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1. Saint of the Day, 08 Aug at AmericanCatholic.org.
2. Ibid.
3. The meaning of Contemplata aliis tradere, the Dominican motto.
4. Constitution on the Church, 10. Second Vatican Council.
5. Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1273.
6. Jerome Nadal, S.J., gave particular emphasis to this phrase in his recollection of St. Ignatius.

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Wiki-image: St. Dominic. PD-US; St. Ignatius Statue, Guelph, photo by PDP

Sunday word, 04 Aug 19

Eighteenth Sunday of the Year B (04 Aug 2019)

Eccl 1.2, 2. 21-23; Ps 90; Col 3. 1-5, 9-11; Lk 12. 13-21

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

Two Implications

St. Paul wrote faith communities he had established. They shaped his messages. They enfleshed the good news of risen Christ Jesus: the baptized participated in the new life of the Risen One; living that life reshaped relationships with all humans and with the God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Miriam and all the prophets before Prophet Jesus. Baptized living still seeks to deepen the absolutely new life of Christ Jesus in us and all we do.

Today’s scriptures suggest two implications about deepening this new life and fostering our friendship¹ for Christ Jesus we share by our baptisms. Implication one is: we live for others. To the Colossians St. Paul suggested no private rigorism to seek divine life. He recommended the community, the common union of our shared humanity. Nationality, gender, status or insider-outsider divisions do not measure Christian life.  St. Paul listed pairs of divisions contemporary to him and the Colossians: Jew/Greek; slave/free; circumcised/uncircumcised. Ours are: addicted/free; male/female; established/migrating; labor/capital; employed/jobless;  traditional/new age; healthy/ill—supply yours.

Private heroics or rigorism tempt us to shape our lives by our measure. The faith community—not private heroics or rigorism—is both shaper and goal of seeking what is of God, who is most real: being honest in word and deed; making every effort to build up others; and being open handed as well as open hearted. Seeking what is truly real, being honest with one another and not living solely for self benefit the faith community, the global, human com-munity and all creation.

Living with no reference to others dooms us to a lonely, meaningless existence. This second implication the Book of Ecclesiastes laid bare. Vanity of vanities was the Jewish Preacher’s way to say that wretched is life lived with no reference to others. That Preacher lived amid advances to humans as well as age-old inclinations to make self the center of things. Those inclinations continue to register as pride, honor and riches, to use Ignatian shorthand. The Preacher courageously witnessed: God is the horizon toward which we lean; the mystery embracing daily routines as well as astonishing wonders and searing traumas.

Jesus taught that, too, in his time of greater ad-vances in travel, communication, urban planning—only three networks the Roman Empire markedly improved. It’s the point of his parable of the rich fool. His folly was not his bounty of barns of barley and other produce; his folly was thinking he completely controlled his life. Not only were his harvest and its market value gifts of the Creator; so was his very self. Had he come to think he controlled the rains, which allowed him to store so much in his barns?

When we live with no reference to God; when we refuse to allow God to be the mystery embracing daily routines as well as astonishing wonders and traumas that sear us, we feel trapped in the futility of it all and lost in ourselves. When we allow God to be our horizon and the mystery embracing us, we live for others with energetic freedom: the freedom of faith. Faith is nothing less than Jesus’ human response to God, God who is also with us, ever inviting and blessing our response. Jesus’ faith is our gift of baptism.

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1. St. Paul conveyed a more humane activity than mentally connecting ideas. The Greek word in Colossians 3.2 we translate as think had richer connotations from what we heard: Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. Other versions offer: Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth [Revised Standard Version]; Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth [King James Version].

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Wiki-images by: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT Renier de Huy JPG02.jpg. CC BY 2.5; Interacting galaxies PD-US