Gospel Commentary from the Irish Dominicans

“And God saw that it was good.” This phrase is repeated six times, like an antiphon, throughout the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. At the end of each day’s work of creation, “God saw that it was good” (verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). And at the end of the entire work, “God saw that it was very good” (verse 31). This is the charter for a healthy-minded lyrical outlook on the natural world (of which we are a part). We are entitled to have an outlook on nature that is religious in its scope and intensity. God is everywhere manifest in nature, because it is his creature. “Every creature speaks God,” said Eckhart.

It is also true that a spirituality that makes only slight mention or no mention at all of the Cross of Christ could hardly be called Christian. A writer of this kind said that for him the Cross of Christ was like a giant question-mark, like a great hook, reaching up to God for an answer, for meaning. But where there is no affirmation that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” it is hard to see the shape of the faith.

There are two contrasting spiritualities, then. But it would be better to think of them as two sides of the Christian faith, like the two sides of a coin. The God of creation and the God of redemption are one and the same God. It was commonplace in the middle ages to see creation as “God’s first book.” What God writes in that first book is not contradicted in the second (the Old Testament), or in the third (Jesus). We might even add a fourth book: the book of your daily life.

God's wisdom is revealed in nature, but even more profoundly in the work of redemption. “Jesus is the hand of God's mercy stretched out towards us,” wrote Leo the Great. We could scarcely have imagined that God was anything like the father of the Prodigal Son, if Jesus had not us invented that parable. And we would certainly not have imagined the depths of God revealed through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

It is this same Jesus who said, “Look at the birds of the air…. Consider the lilies of the field…. Do not worry about tomorrow,” and who said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

We are not meant to choose between these two sides of the faith, but to hold them together in fruitful tension.

--- Donagh O’Shea, for Today’s Good News, the website of the Dominicans of Ireland_____________________________________________________________________________________

Seek Ye First

Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God

And His righteousness

And all these things shall be added unto you

Allelu, Alleluia

Ask and it shall be given unto you

Seek and ye shall find

Knock and the door shall be opened unto you

Allelu, Alleluia

You do not live by bread alone

But by every word

That proceeds from the mouth of God

Allelu, Alleluia

-- Karen Lafferty, based on Matthew 6:33

There is no other remedy for our passing ills than God’s eternal love for us. At bottom, all our sufferings derive from the fact that we want joy and possessions that are altogether too narrow and fleeting for the greatness of our hearts. – Anonymous Carthusian monk, quoted in They Speak By Silences

I'm taking the Lord at His word, and I'm trusting Him to prove His Word. It's kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket, but we've already put our trust in Him for salvation, so why not do it as far as our life is concerned?

-- Ed McCully, Christian missionary who died in Ecuador

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.

---Jesus Christ

Lilies

I have been thinking

about living

like the lilies

that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall

in the wedge of the wind,

and have no shelter

from the tongues of cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards

and have no legs.

Still I would like to be

as wonderful

as that idea.

But if I were a lily

I think I would wait all day

for the green face

of the hummingbird

to touch me.

What I mean is,

could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?

When Van Gogh

preached to the poor

of course he wanted to save someone-

most of all himself.

He wasn't a lily,

and wandering through the bright fields

only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.

I think I will always be lonely

in this world, where the cattle

graze like a black and white river -

where the ravishing lilies

melt, without protest, on their tongues-

where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,

just rises and floats away.

---by Mary Oliver

MARDI GRAS/SHROVE TUESDAY: The Day before Ash Wednesday

The last day before Lent is a weird mix of happiness and sadness. We say goodbye to the joys of winter. We look forward to the coming of Easter. Perhaps the people who keep this day the most wildly are the ones who intend to keep Lent the most seriously.

In England, today is Shrove Tuesday, and another word for Carnival (the festive time before Lent) is “Shrovetide.” “Shrive” is an old word for having your sins forgiven. People would get ready for Lent by celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation and by asking forgiveness of one another. Then they would keep the disciples of Lent as their penance. Lenten penance is a sign of sorrow for injustices and an act of thanksgiving for pardon. That was the serious business of Shrovetide. Another task during Carnival was the eating up of Lent’s forbidden foods. For over a thousand years, most Christians kept Lent by not eating animal products. It’s unusual that a custom would be kept by Christians in both the East and West, but that’s how important this tradition was. It probably began out of necessity. The coming warm weather would spoil foods in storage. Also, late winter and early spring are the animals’ birthing season. By not eating animal products at this time of year, people helped a new generation get off to a healthy start. Christians thought that by not eating animal products during Lent, they could better resemble Noah and his family aboard the ark. They could help prepare the world for a new creation.

At Carnival all meat, butter, cheese and eggs god used up in a final feast before the Lenten fast. Making pancakes and doughnuts uses up a lot of these ingredients. Russians call the days before Lent “butter Week.” In some countries, the last day before Lent is called Doughnut Day or Pancake Day. The Irish call it “Ash Even.” The French call it Mardi Gras, which means Fat Tuesday.

In Venice, at midnight on Ash Wednesday Even, a straw figure named Carnevale, whose body has been stuffed with fireworks, is burned in a fire in St. Mark’s Plaza. In some places last year’s Palm Sunday branches are burned with an effigy of old man winter, and so Lent’s ashes get made at the same time that winter burns up. –Mary Ellen Hynes, from Companion to the Calendar

A NOTE ON CARNIVAL: Folk etymologies exist which state that the word comes from the Late Latin expression carne vale, which means "farewell to meat," signifying that those were the last days when one could eat meat before the fasting of Lent. The word carne may also be translated as flesh, so suggesting carne vale as "a farewell to the flesh", a phrase actually embraced by certain Carnival celebrants who encourage letting go of your former (or everyday) self and embracing the carefree nature of the festival. -- WIkipedia

Reflection for March 2, 2014: Learning from the Lilies

Learn from the way the wildflowers grow, Jesus tells us today. Do not worry about your life.

This is clearly not as easy as it sounds. And I’m not sure what would happen if we lived as if we believed it. Certainly, the world would be a very different place. If, instead of mailing my gas bill today, I told the nice folks at SourceGas: “I am not worried about winter, because I am trying to be more like a wildflower. Consider the lilies in the field, or maybe the dandelions in my backyard. They don’t pay for heat, and yet they do fine every spring,” I rather suspect the company would reply, “Right. O ye of little heat, you might not worry, but your pipes are going to freeze if you don’t pay up!” But of course faith in God is not like putting money in the bank or even taking it out to pay your bills; it is the kind of thing you cannot buy or sell, even if you’re a giant corporation. Faith is much more real and lasting than those kind of things. No matter what the prosperity churches say, Jesus has a low opinion of our love of lucre. “No one can serve two masters,” as he dryly says. We talk a great deal about God, but I’m afraid we tend to tithe to the First Church of Mammon and worship its greedy god. And the truth is, it’s not always easy to just trust in the Lord. “I do not give to you as the world gives,” Jesus warns us. God’s priorities are rarely our own. We want security, and ease, and comfort, and predictability, and instead we’re given LIFE in all its unexpected, sometimes heartbreaking glory and wildness.

No matter how hard we try, we can’t control everything – not even something as fundamentally important as the moment of our own birth, or death. And yet Jesus tells us not to worry about it. Even if we’re not in control of what happens, we can almost always control our reactions to it. You can’t make yourself taller by thinking about it, Jesus says. But you can learn how to live with being short. No matter how much money you spend on makeup, you will never look as pretty as the average daisy. But you can learn to accept yourself as you are – and to relish the beauty of God’s wildflowers.

Not that there aren’t genuine problems in the world that need our attention. But anxiety is a paralyzing thing; we become like rabbits caught on the highway, blinded by oncoming headlights – and as everybody knows to their sorrow, when rabbits or other wild animals jump, they almost always jump in the wrong direction. The opposite of anxiety isn’t “Que sera sera” or “Don’t worry be happy.” It is learning to live life bravely, with open eyes and an open mind and an even more open, loving, compassionate heart. It’s being aware of problems and facing them deliberately and calmly – learning to act, and to act both kindly and intelligently, before things get out of hand and go completely nutzoid.

I love how we join our hands and hearts to say or sing the Lord’s Prayer at every Mass. And I’ve come to love that odd little bit in the middle, those words that the priest interjects as a sort of refrain: “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Years ago, that struck me as almost trivial, even unnecessary. “Protect us from all anxiety,” as the prayer used to say, and as I say it to myself when I pray it at home. I thought: What an odd thing to single out and pray for during Mass. It’s like pausing in the midst of Mozart’s Requiem to do a commercial for Prozac. All the trouble and sin and sorrow and death in the world, and we single out anxiety and emotional distress! But a lot of water has gone under my bridges in the years since then, and I have experienced enough anxiety to know what a terrible, crippling thing it is. Not only is it unpleasant to live with: It is possible to argue that much of what we do wrong in our lives stems from acting out of fear or desperation, impulsively – in anxiety.

Years ago, when my mother first got sick – when her mind began to fall apart, and the pattern of my own life unraveled as well – I used to start up, wide awake in the middle of the night, trembling with a sense of dread foreboding. Oddly, I never felt that way when I was dealing with Mom, in person; as hard as it was, I wasn’t really scared even as she was dying in my arms. Instead, the anxiety hit me in the dark cold hours when I was alone, and there wasn’t a thing I could do in the whole wide world. It was a kind of irrational, bone-freezing terror, and it reminded me of the old litany in time of plague, with its stark refrain Timor mortis conturbat me -- “The fear of death comes over me.” And it’s happened since my Dad died, too, those nights when I wake up feeling as though I’ve just received that dreadful phone call telling me that he’s gone. It is not at all a nice feeling to have at 3 in the morning. And although I have faced death and other scary hard things more than once in my life, I never feel as afraid as I feel those moments when I am safe in my bed but utterly filled with anxiety.

And that is why I now ask God to protect me from all anxiety and keep me safe from all distress. Frightened people tend to do terrible things. How often does one person hurt kill another, simply because they’re afraid of being killed first? (These days my own birth state of Florida is becoming famous for shooting first and asking questions later, if at all.) We even deliberately torture people, simply because we’re afraid; we later say “we were just following orders” because we’re afraid not to follow orders. Nations stockpile weapons that could destroy the whole planet, out of fear. People do dishonest, unjust, even wicked things, because they’re afraid of poverty and financial insecurity. This kind of fear cannot be calmed by threats or lectures or weapons – even by having huge bank accounts and a posse of armed security guards. It can only be eased by love, and trust, and grace. We need to learn to work together to resolve the genuine troubles our poor world faces. But before we can do anything, we need ask for and accept the help and the loving grace of our God.

In my own midnight anxiety, I learned to breathe deeply and slowly and repeat the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It doesn’t make my problems vanish; I still have to deal with them later. But it opens my heart to grace – and grace pours in, and fills my frightened emptiness. And so I pray: Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. Protect us from all anxiety, as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. – Diane Sylvain