Daily Postings

This difficult year is fading into history.  There were pleasant happenings that gave us joy and happiness.  There were painful happenings that forced us to grow.  We rejoiced when new loved ones were born.  They renewed our zest for life.  We cried when other loved ones died.  With each of them a part of us died.  When only few of our classmates are left, we know the time is growing short.  May we look forward to that time with joy, with the same enthusiasm we face our New Year.

God is still in control of his creation.  We have nothing to fear.  Even the worst always passes.  In spite of all the prophets of doom, in a few months spring will be here, the economy will be moving at a greater pace, many workers will be back on their jobs, values will begin to rise, new factories will be opening to manufacture new products to replace those that are obsolete, new cars will be rolling down our streets, sunny days will grow longer, we will be again tilling our gardens and planting our crops, and there will be signs of hope in war weary countries.  We don’t bring these things about.  We do our little bit, but only God can move the world, and every small part of that vast machinery.  Our prayers can haste that change, so we humbly ask Him to help us and to save us from all those senseless things we do to ourselves and our world.

We thank you, Father, for this past year and all that happened.  We ask you to give us joy and hope as we face this New Year.  Help us to approach our new life with your vision so we can see all things through your eyes and live in such a way that we can do our part to usher in a new dawn that will bring life to those who will follow us.

What is happening in Iran is sad, and not only sad, but tragic.  In a short time, there will be revolution and all those decent protesting people in the streets will be involved in a violent upheaval.  There will be horrible outbursts with blood flowing, as decent, innocent people resort to violent struggle to take back their country from cruel and hateful tyrants.  But, we won’t call these people terrorists because we have witnessed their hopelessness and their hopelessness.  It is too bad that the oppression and hopelessness of the Palestinian people has been intentionally kept from us so that we could not see their cruel suffering and hopelessness as they were methodically terrorized and driven into refugee camps so a democracy could be set up without interference from the Palestinian majority who had been living there since before the time of Jesus.  I had been following events there for many years, and recently I have found a highly respected Israeli historian who wrote the whole sad story in a book entitled, “The Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestine,” by Illan Pappe.   It is too bad our own leaders don’t realize that the strategy has always been, right from the beginning, for all of Palestine to be taken over and the whole Palestinian nation be driven out.  And what most Americans don’t realize is that the Fundamentalist Evangelicals in our own country have been preaching this and encouraging the Israelis to continue this evil destruction of a decent people.  And these fundamentalists are the very ones who are the anti-abortion patriots.

On the day after Christmas, the Second Day of Christmas, we celebrate the feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr.  I am always struck by that feast being celebrated as soon as we celebrate with such joy the coming on Jesus.  This year when I started my Mass, it dawned on me how fitting it was to celebrate the feast of Saint Stephen as part of Christmas, because it reflects so powerfully the reality that we can understand the mystery of Christmas only in light of the Cross.  Jesus’ coming into our lives won heaven for us, and became one of us so he could teach us how we can share his divine holiness.  And we best reflect Jesus when we finally reach a point in our lives when we can forgive those who hurt us.  As St. Stephen was being stoned to death, he asked God to forgive those who were killing him.  With Jesus’ grace he had risen above his humanness to forgive his enemies.

That is a virtue which is not part of the Hebrew Scriptures and is not part of Islam, where the ‘lex talionis,’ the ‘law of revenge’ is condoned.  And it is certainly a part of many Christians’ lives as well.  How many supposedly good Christians piously go to Communion faithfully and have refused to talk to their mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters for most of their life and feel not the slightest guilt.  They piously justify it by saying they do it protect themselves.  Protect themselves from what?  Hurt feelings?  That can hardly be a sufficient justification from cutting brothers and sisters and mother or father out of your life.  Most excuses are so petty, they border on childish petulance. It is little more than a pious form of hatred, because they coldly cut out of their lives the ones God Himself bonded to them.  They care little whether they are sick or dying or are in need, or hurting. They just don’t care.  They can die and it is if a dog died.  They then may piously say a pray, to soothe their own conscience but that does not absolve from the guilt of a life of cold indifference.  Real genuine Christian love prompts us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable to loved ones with difficult and ill-mannered personalities, even if we get our feelings hurt occasionally.  And often it is ourselves who can be the offensive ones, but it is so easy to look upon ourselves as the holy innocents and others the mean ones.

And this sickness of unforgiveness is not limited just to families.  It is a national and international sickness that is rapidly destroying the world.  National leaders today make vengefulness and unforgiveness a patriotic virtue, and thrive on humiliating and demeaning their enemies, not just international enemies, but political enemies.  It took an atheistic president of an African nation to finally have the wisdom to say at a gathering of African leaders, “Unless we take Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness seriously and apply it to our international relations, we will never have peace.” 

Years ago, I took my mother and father on vacation, which I used to do every summer.  We took a different route each year as we traveled cross-country visiting different states and different sites each summer.  It was an adventure for us, and my parents were wonderful traveling companions.  They enjoyed everything and had the curiosity to appreciate the endless treasures our country offers to those who have the openness to appreciate these awesome gifts of God.  One summer we passed through, among other places, the Petrified Forest, where there are no signs of life for miles and miles, just trees, so ancient there is no wood content left in them. All the wood fiber has turned to stone, beautifully varied colored stone.  Many of the tree trunks are over two feet thick.  Most of the trunks are broken into sections of varying lengths, all lying helter-skelter in the sand. It seems that at one time they were standing upright, when possibly the area for some reason become flooded or became an ocean or a sea, and the minerals from the water replaced the cells throughout the whole of each tree, as they stood upright in the mineral saturated water.  Then, as hundreds of millions of years passed and the water disappeared, the standing trees fell to the ground and cracked apart into large sections.

As I stood there pondering the mystery of what I was experiencing, my mother and father wandered and I was standing there alone.  When I realized I was alone, I was overcome with a frightening feeling of desolation, and loneliness.  My imagination played tricks and made me feel as if I was on a planet way out in the middle of space, all by myself.  It was a horrible feeling, and then I realized God was teaching me something, that I am, and we all are, alone on a planet way out in the middle of space.  There may be others around but we really belong to no one.  Other human beings come and go through our lives, some we may love deeply, some may be friends, but we are basically alone, and the deepest secrets of our souls we are unable to share with anyone, because who can ever understand or comprehend, unless they had experienced the same things we had experienced?  They may listen, and try to understand, and empathize, but how can we share what we felt and what those experiences meant to us and how they affected us?  That is not possible.  And then, we finally come to the realization that we are very much alone, on a planet way out in the middle of space, unable to bond at the deepest level of our beings with any other person on this planet.

It is then that we realize the aloneness that Jesus must have felt, being on a planet far from His home, with beings who were totally unable to understand Him, His thoughts, His dreams, His vision of life.  This aloneness made Him feel a continual need to be close to His Father as the only One who could possibly understand Him. It was this experience which He felt continually that made it possible for Him to understand our feeling of aloneness on this planet. It is in our recognizing this aloneness which drove Jesus to His Father’s companionship, which drives us to realize that only Jesus can understand us and the deepest needs of our souls and can help us feel comfortable sharing with him our pain, and aloneness, and especially, at times, and for so many, that terrible loneliness, that drives people to frightening feelings of desolation and dangerous feelings of futility.

I think that is the real beginning of spirituality, when we finally realize that only God can fill that horrible void in our souls which can never be satiated by anyone merely human, or anything merely material.

In talking to people the past few days, it is clear that not everyone has a happy experience around Christmastime.  It reminds me of a Christmas card that a friend and I designed many years ago.  It shows Mary holding the Child as He looks over her shoulder up into the sky and sees a bright star.  He is extending His arms out as if to reach for it.  As He does, the light from the star casts as shadow on the ground in front of His mother.  It is a shadow of the Cross, and Mary realizes what the priest in the Temple meant when he prophesied, “You can understand His coming only in light of the Cross.”

Edith Stein, the famous German-Jewish philosopher who courageously spoke out against Nazism, knowing full well what her future would be like when later on she became a cloistered Carmelite nun, and out of retaliation, would be arrested and sent to Auschwitz to die as a martyr.  She understood that in embracing Jesus, and fighting for what He teaches, you jeopardize all that is dear to you, which prompted her to remark in one of her writings, “You can understand the mystery of Christmas only in light of the Cross.”

So, when we have sad experiences around this feast of joy, we are reminded, that in embracing Jesus, it is not always going to joy and happiness, but also pain and disappointments that come from faithfully carrying our cross behind Him. It is precisely in that painful part of our lives that we find the ultimate joy, in knowing that He is always there with us, and in spite of the pain, we find in His intimacy, a profound joy and peace.

Our Savior has come!  Happy Second Day of Christmas!  He offers us a new life, and not just a new life here on earth, but a life with Him forever in a world that will last forever, a world of eternal happiness. 

Already, people are finding fault.  Early this morning on the radio, the journalist was interviewing an author who wrote about the prospect of living for eternity.  He mentioned that it frightened him, the prospect of eternal life.  “I need to rest, I need change. I don’t know whether I want to live forever,” that is the objection of so many to what Jesus promised.  After eighty years we begin to get nervous.  Approaching a hundred years we begin to panic.  “I don’t know anybody any more.  I want to get this over with.” 

Then imagine two hundred years, and then five hundred years, and then ten thousand years and then a million years.  After a while you begin to get frightened with the prospect of living into an eternity of the unknown.  But, since people are already beginning to complain about this gift that Jesus considered such a wonderful prospect for us, maybe we should think about it.

Twenty-nine years ago, my doctor told me that I could no longer continue parish work or I would be dead in probably six months.  I retired, and in one brief moment my whole previous ‘life’ came to an end.  I eventually lived alone, with insufficient funds to live on, and out of phone contact with the world, and no longer needed by anyone.  My companions were the birds, the squirrels, the farm animals across the street, a dying man with emphysema who lived next door, and an elderly lady who lived two houses up.  I had ‘died.’

Then I began to write and a whole new ‘life’ opened up, turning out to be a ‘life’ in an exciting new world, a thousand times more exciting than the world I had just left.  My books began circulating throughout the country and into other countries.  Requests for talks and interviews came from all over the world, most of which I tried to honor. 

Now, after thirty years, that ‘life’ is coming to an end.  I realized that three months ago when something inside me said, “This phase of your life is ending.  Spend more time taking care of things at home in New York.”   I ended my traveling to Maryland every month and began spending more time in Altamont, New York, where I work on messages to you every day, messages which now reach people in twenty-five countries.  My movie producers called to tell me that they have prospects for more movies and for a weekly TV series based on “Joshua and The City.”

Already two ‘lives’ have ended and I find myself being brought to the threshold of a new ‘life.’  Am I frightened?  No, but it made me realize that life has not been boring, so when I heard that man on the radio this morning talking about people being frightened about an eternity of happiness, I find myself asking, “What are they frightened about?”   I can see how doing the same thing and associating with the same people for an eternity could be depressing, but the eternal happiness that Jesus promised certainly cannot be boring or depressing.  I think heaven will be something like what I experienced.  I ‘died’ to two different ‘lives,’ and am now in a third ‘life,’ and I am not at all frightened, but find it a totally new and exciting adventure.  I think heaven must be similar to those experiences.   Heaven has to be vast in its dimensions, and in the possibilities of its variety of ‘lives.’  We may experience a phase of life in heaven where we live out new experiences totally different from anything we experienced here on earth.  We meet our parents and other loves ones, and old earthly friends from our previous life, and we do things and accomplish things that allowed us to fulfill dreams we once had but were never able to attain.  Now we have fulfilled them and that phase of our new life is closing down, and we then find ourselves on the threshold of a new and totally different kind of life, with different surroundings, and new exciting persons, maybe different from those we knew from our previous phase, but with different ways, and different cultures, and different music, even more comforting and enchanting than what we had known before.  Though the beings there may speak differently than what we were used to, we understand them.  Soon, we find ourselves living a very enjoyable life with new ways and new things to accomplish, and new dreams we can strive to attain, and a whole world of new possibilities that challenge us to use our abilities to produce whatever products have value and meaning in that phase of our life.  And, still, as compatible with that new life, is the ability to stay in touch with all our parents, the roots of our existence and all our loved ones, and those who were a significant part of our life on earth long before.  With them we will never lose contact.  They will always be a beautiful part of our heaven.

So, in heaven we pass from phase to new phase, as we live to the fulfillment of each one, and then move on to ever new and challenging phases of life when nothing ever becomes boring, and where rest and relaxation and gracious social living is an integral part of each phase.  And over the thousands of years there is never the possibility that we would exhaust the endless phases of life and new adventures that prevent us from every becoming bored.  And, although we may not die, in our earthly sense of dying, each phase of our life will phase out as we begin to move into a different and exciting new phase.

So, when we think of heaven, the thought of eternity being so long shouldn’t frighten us, but should excite our imaginations to wonder about the endless possible experiences that we will have when God brings us home to that awesome world.  And since we use only a fraction of our brain’s potential here on earth, maybe that other unused part is what we are going to need for the future.

Jesus has come and has enriched our lives.  He promised to be with us always, and to assure us of his living presence, He gave us awesome gifts.  But, his gifts are not always easy for us to accept.  His greatest gift is the Church which is the instrument He established as the channel of His divine life and the fullness of His message until the end of time.  The Church is not always easy to digest, but it is the treasure He gave us.  So, don’t give up on it.  We find the fullness of Jesus and His heritage in the Church, and if the Church were to disappear from the face of the earth, our awareness of God would dissolve away into a nebulous cloud of total unknowing just as it was before He came.  Our knowledge of God would become a confused chaos of pagan idols once again.  The dogged fidelity of the Church to all that Jesus taught and gave us is a necessity in keeping our knowledge of God alive, even though that fidelity seems at times annoyingly rigid. It is our safeguard of the integrity of all Jesus bequeathed to us.  So as difficult and obnoxious as so many of us priests can be at times, we must realize that we are not the Church. The Church is bigger than that.  It is still the living presence of Jesus throughout history.  It is like an awesome ocean liner designed to carry us safely across a wild and stormy ocean to the shore of another and beautiful country

He has come at last; to heal the brokenhearted, to give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.  He has come because He knows sinners are hurting and these are His greatest concern, not because of their sins, but because of the emptiness and pain that drives them to sin.  He has come not to criticize or find fault, but to heal the hurt that lies beneath our weaknesses, and our struggling to overcome habits and weaknesses of a lifetime. He has come to heal the deep wounds in your heart by showing you the compassion He learned by his own pains inflicted by disloyal and faithless friends.  He has come because He knows you’re hurting, and He wants to be your friend, not just any friend, but the kind of friend that  will never leave you not matter what happens between you, or how often you think you have disappointed Him.  He is beyond disappointment.  He knows you as He made you, and He loves you as you are, so welcome Him into your heart, as He invites you to celebrate His birthday with Him.  Be happy and be glad that you are His, and will never not be His, because He loves you too much and will never let you go.  All He wants is your love and your friendship.  He asks nothing more; your heart will give all without pain, once you are convinced of how much He loves you.   Help Him to have a happy birthday.

The long-awaited Savior is about to come.  We wait with longing hearts for him to come into our lives once again, and fill the empty void within each of us.  When I was a monk, it was so beautiful.  All four weeks of Advent were filled with daylong reminders of our need for a Savior. Our seven-fold liturgical hours for chanted prayers were filled with songs and prophecies of longing for His coming.  The whole four weeks were saturated with a sense of what Our Savior should mean to us, and when He finally came at Christmas, our liturgy burst into joyous, prayerful welcome.  Life in the monastery was so beautiful.  That is a part of my life I still miss, and as sit alone with my own solitary liturgy, it is not the same, and my memory so often goes back to those days.  His presence, however, is still real in the life of all of us.  And at Christmas it is so important that when He comes to us so full of joy as He brings His priceless treasure to us, that we don’t ignore Him, but, recognize that He’s there, and welcome Him with joyful hearts and express to Him our love and gratitude.  So many come to his birthday parties, and never even acknowledge his presence.  Even when the day is busy with family and friends, we can still think of him frequently during the day and quietly speak to Him. 

The beautiful thing about the sacred liturgy surrounding the Mass is that it is not make-believe.  It is real, and Jesus mystically, yet no less really renews the process of redemption for us so we can commit ourselves to His life and relive the events in his life, his life become part of our living experience.  If Jesus was not God, and eternal, this could not happen, but because He is God, and He is eternal, what Jesus did two thousand years ago, did not just take place and end.  His life set into motion a process, the ongoing process of our redemption.  In the Mass He makes it possible for us to be one with Him as he activates that process for us so can play our role in it.  When we celebrate Christmas, His birth is real to each of us, as He comes to life in our souls, so we can allow Him to work through us.  He gives us a chance to receive Him in Bethlehem, and since all is present to God, like the shepherds, we are a comfort to him, and the grace of the Nativity touches our souls, as it touched the souls of the shepherds who came to visit Him.

This is a great comfort for us, to know that Jesus allows us to be with Him, even if in this mystical way, as He comes into the world. I hope that we are free enough to spend time with him on the day He comes so He will know that we feel closeness to Him and want to be a part of His life.  That is such a beautiful gift He offers to us in our liturgy.  Hopefully, it will stay with us as we celebrate the day with Him, and Mary and Joseph.