rory cooney’s blog 2009: “the gospel starts here”

A doozy with the heart of a shepherd

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:44:25 -0500

Saturday evening’s mass for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time will have another layer of celebration added to it: our pastor for the past 20 years, Fr. Jack Dewes, has retired. He will continue to live and work at St. Anne as pastor emeritus, but this mass will allow the parish to honor God’s work in him for two decades in Barrington, and his cooperation with grace in the meantime.
It has been no small accomplishment to shepherd St. Anne into the 21st century. The growing “bedroom community,” on a Metra stop on the Northwest Line out of Chicago, was worshipping in a country church built in 1950, which was the 2nd or 3rd church built for the parish. Once a parish of a few hundred Catholics in a largely rural Methodist community, St. Anne’s has grown to a size of nearly 3,000 households. As it approached 1,500 and then 2,000, it became clear than no number of masses celebrated in a little stone church seating 350 was going to be enough on Sunday. Early in his tenure, with the counsel and collaboration of my liturgist friends and colleagues Courtney Murtaugh and Clem Aseron, the parish moved its contemporary celebrations to the Dillon Center across the street from the church, which doubled as the school gym. Capturing the spirit of the Eucharist in its ancient and new depth, they arranged the gym for worship with antiphonal seating, with the portable altar and ambo along a central axis, and the seven hundred or so chairs arranged facing those foci from either side.
A side benefit of the gym was that, unlike the church, it was air conditioned, a welcome relief in the often sultry Illinois summer. With five weekend services, three were in the gym during the summer, two in the winter, with the others celebrated in the “old” church. With a different building and even a street separating them, the two worshipping communities grew more settled in distinctive worship styles, one based on the pipe organ (a serviceable Möhler), one based in the ensemble, though an organ mass was celebrated in the gym on the mighty Conn.
In what was to become one of the ten or so best things that ever happened to me, in 1993, the music director went seeking greener pastures. I had asked Mary Prete, then the owner of Alverno Religious Books in Chicago and a friend and fellow road warrior, to keep her ears open for possible good fits for me in the area. My friend and classmate Bill Fraher had found a perfect fit at Old St. Pat’s in downtown Chicago, so why not me? As it turned out, she and Courtney spoke, and at the 1993 NPM Convention in St. Louis, I was unexpected greeted by Courtney’s southern smile after a GIA showcase. “Hi, I’m Courtney Murtaugh,” she said, handing me a packet of information about the parish, including their bulletin. “We hear you’re looking for a job, and we’re looking for a music director.” A month later, Jack Dewes picked me up and O’Hare, and I was interviewed by several staff members and him. At the end of it, we all felt pretty comfortable, but I told them that I couldn’t make a commitment until after Christmas, four months down the road. Jack said to me, “If you want the job, we’ll keep it open for you.” And they did, and here I am. I’m a lucky guy, and just let me say that this is proof that Jack lived his life open to divine inspiration. ☺ Or some kind of inspiration, but it was divine to me.
What I didn’t know then was that this inner circle was already planning in an indirect way for a stunning project: the building of a new home for this divided community. In the next three or four years, the plan would gain a new concreteness and then blueprints, guided by Jack’s vision and the expertise of local liturgical consultant and artist John Buscemi. The result, $17,000,000 later, is the church that is St. Anne, a completely reimagined and restored daily mass chapel built from the old church, and a gutted and modernized pre-K through 8 school. Of that $17,000,000, nine years after the dedication of the building, less than $1M remains to be repaid, thanks both to the generosity of the local community and the tireless efforts of Jack and his circle to raise the funds.
It wasn’t easy. A tremendous amount of resistance grew up to the idea of expanding the church at all, let alone expanding it into a “modern” (of course, it’s not modern at all) antiphonal design with a separate daily mass and reservation chapel. Letters were mailed, some anonymous, some using stolen parish mailing lists, decrying Fr. Jack’s work and the plan to “ruin” St. Anne’s. People left. People stopped supporting the parish. But he saw it through those painful months, and the building project flourished. The plan was approved by Cardinal Bernadin, but he died before the building was completed, and the new Church was dedicated on the 2nd Sunday of Easter, 2000. It was April 30, which happened to be Jack’s ordination anniversary as well.
Jack’s style is like a lot of Chicago priests, liturgically speaking, tending St. Anne’s logo, set into the tiles of the Fr. Jack Dewes Gathering Space, is an open cross surrounded by words describing the mission of the parish.toward the familiar and loose around the edges. But it is always prayerful and inviting, and his personable and generous way come naturally to him. He is fond of theater and music, and these passions come through in his public style. Interwoven for a generation in the lives of Barrington Catholics, he has come to place where he is now marrying couples whom he baptized or gave first communion to in his first years in the parish. His hospitable instincts and style have become the trademark of the community. Committed to all four pillars of the apostolic tradition, St. Anne’s has put its money where the mouth of God is in catechesis, worship, social justice, and community building, and all of this because of the ministry of Fr. Jack and his inspiration of thousands of others.
So we will gather for Eucharist and be thankful this Saturday, me as much as anyone for this man who hired me fifteen and a half years ago and made me a part of this little piece of the mission of the Church, and made it possible for me to support my family even though money was always tight for everybody. For Jack’s 40th anniversary of ordination, I wrote and arranged the song “Heart of a Shepherd,” since published by GIA Publications. Like the church he built, “Heart” is a bit of the old and the new, combining the ancient text of Psalm 23 with Père Joseph Gelineau’s early 1960s setting of the verses with an original refrain taken from the Easter gospel in which the risen Lord instructs Peter, “If you love me, feed“Heart of a Shepherd,” from Today. Click arrow to play, click here, or artwork, to go to iTunes. my lambs, feed my sheep.” “And for my part,” I have added with a bit of poetic license, “I give you the heart of a shepherd.” This is the essence of the man we have all grown to love over the years, and who we all hope will have a long and active and joyful retirement. Never were the words of a gospel so appropriately to be proclaimed at a priest’s retirement mass: “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” He’s the servant who is pouring the scotch and singing Rodgers and Hammerstein; he’s the servant at the hospital, the funeral home, the wedding, the baptism, and Sunday after Sunday a thousand times.
Ecce, sacerdos magnus qui in diebus suis placuit Deo. Ideo, jurejurando, fecit illum Dominus crescere in populo suo.
In the vernacular: Now, there is a great priest who in his life made God happy. Therefore, by a solemn promise, God made him flourish among his people. I haven’t mentioned that for most of this year Jack, a fairly robust and healthy guy, has been laid up with a back problem that incapacitated him and made it impossible for him even to say Mass for about eight months. This party was delayed from July, because even with advance planning, his healing did not progress as hoped. He is finally able to participate and enjoy the event, which is in itself a source of joy for us who are his friends and well-wishers.
Ad multos annos, Jack.
Call to Worship: Not to Us, Lord (Walker, OCP)
Gathering: No Greater Love (Joncas, GIA)
Psalm 25: Hold Me in Life (Huijbers/Oosterhuis)
Gifts: Do Not Fear to Hope (Cooney, OCP/NALR)
Communion: Heart of a Shepherd (Cooney, GIA)
Recessional: You Have Built Your House of Living Stones (Cooney, WLP)
At the other masses this Sunday: 
Gathering: Let the Children Come to Me (Cooney, WLP)
Communion: Faithful Family
Recessional: We Will Serve the Lord

Coming to terms with the cross

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:45:10 -0500

It was my turn to write the lead article for the bulletin this week, so here’s a preview of Sunday’s Clarion piece. I just wanted to put something on here — I’ve been so busy I don’t know which end of the pen to pick up.
“Who do you say that I am?” Catholic Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, in a recent lecture at the Presbyterian Church of Barrington, told us that in the first century there was a man known throughout the world as “son of God,” “light from light,” “prince of peace,” and, simply, “God.” Who was that person? he asks rhetorically, and then he tells us: Caesar Augustus. Crossan’s point is to remind us of a simple fact: in the Roman empire, there was room for only one emperor, one king, one god, and that was Caesar. Anyone claiming that title, or announcing another kingdom, or laying claim to the loyalty of the emperor’s subjects, was an enemy of the empire, and the full force of Roman military might was brought against such a person. The gallows reserved for those who preached this infidelity, this sedition against the pax Romana, was the cross.
The Roman empire, like empires before and after it, offered a version of “peace” to civilization. That peace was based on military victory, upon force and threat of force. In exchange for the peace and protection of the legions, subject states were allowed a measure of civil and religious autonomy. Paying for the presence and readiness of those legions was not inexpensive, however, and tribute taxes were collected from every subject in every country to pay for the salaries and expenses of the occupation forces as well as to fill the imperial coffers in Rome. The pax Romana worked pretty well for the Romans. Less so for the rest of the world.
Into this world came Jesus of Nazareth, and his message at the outset of Mark’s story is “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” Jesus’ message is a clear alternative to the empire of Caesar. The empire of God offers peace not through violence and coercion, but through equality and justice as revealed and mediated in the stories of the exodus, creation, and the Torah. The empire of God and the empire of Caesar are alternatives, not parallel courses. Either violence or justice. Either domination or equality. “No one can serve two masters.” One has to “repent,” that is, change one’s mind, or turn in the opposite direction, to move between the two worlds.
Peter’s answer to Jesus, “You are the anointed,” is the wrong answer, which is why Jesus silences him. We know it is the wrong answer because Peter rebukes Jesus about the path of surrender he is about to take. Peter’s vision is of an anointed one like Caesar, an empire like the empires of this world. Jesus tells him, with words that reveal the temptation that he himself must have felt, that Peter is not going in the right direction. “Get behind me,” Jesus says. Follow me. God goes a different way.
The choice of the cross reveals to us the paschal mystery of God. The death and resurrection of the Messiah demonstrate that, just like the empire of God is not like those of this world, God’s self, the God of Jesus, is not like the gods of this world. Far from a god of war or coercion, the God of Jesus is revealed as a beloved father. This God of ours does not grasp at divinity, but pours self out in creation and incarnation, sharing the divine spirit with the universe. The raising of Jesus from the death inflicted upon him by the god Caesar reveals to us which of these powers is the stronger, so that in this life or any other, we “walk in the presence of God in the land of the living.”
Mark’s story of Jesus begins with those enthralling words that act as both a title and a theme: Here begins the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The announcement of the arrival of the kingdom of justice and equality, the “good news” for the poor, is just the beginning. The choice of Jesus to be its prophet and vanguard and revelatory incarnation is just the beginning. The reaction of the empire against Jesus and his disciples, in spite of their non-violent resistance to injustice and Roman domination and the collaboration of Jewish authorities, was the cross. The cross, too, is thus “the beginning of the gospel.” How the empire of God’s peace and equality and non-violence will grow is determined over and over again by the choice of us who are baptized into the sign of the cross. The empire of God asks the church in every age to answer the question: Who do you say that I am? With the apostle James, we answer that question not with just words, but with lives lived in peace, mercy, and justice, whatever the political cost in a world still dominated by Caesar.
Here’s what we’re singing at St. Anne’s this week. You can click on the links if you like, to hear a snippet from iTunes or another reputable source:
Gathering: Glory in the Cross (Schutte)
Penitential Rite: Mass of St. Aidan (Cooney)
Psalm 116: I Will Walk in the Presence of God (Daigle)
Gospel Acclamation: Mass of St. Aidan (Cooney)
Preparation Rite: The Christ of God (Foley)
Acclamation: Mass of St. Aidan (Cooney)
Communion: Christ the Icon (Cooney)
Recessional: Jerusalem, My Destiny (Cooney)

I’m well. I’m hungry. I’m so ironic.

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 21:05:25 -0500

OK, it’s true. This is totally trivial. It’s all about me. But I’ve got to try to exorcise this exercise demon. The diet has to die. There is life beyond gravy.
Some of you may recall how many years ago it was (7 years, in fact) that I had this vision, while on vacation in Florida, that everyone at Walt Disney World was horribly overweight, and I was one with the morsel majority. I’m sure it was hallucinating in the impossibly humid 4th of July heat of the midway, but I had an overwhelming, almost frightened, feeling of claustrophobia. I came home from that trip resolved to do something about my ever-expanding girth.
And so I started walking that summer through that fall, and did pretty well with all that for a couple of years, right up until I had the bout with prostate cancer in winter of 2004. That put an end to the walking for a few months, but it did bring my weight down to the mid-220s, where it hadn’t been for a while. From that time pretty much on, it’s been on a slow upward arc until, in the spring of this year, I actually weighed in at 270. Even I was embarrassed; this was a new high for me as far as I knew. At my pre-op most corpulent, I think I was 268. Not only that, said my dear Dr. Mini Thakkar in her best admonishing voice, my cholesterol was high in spite of the years of taking Lipitor, and it wasn’t likely to decrease unless I eased up on my consumption of bacon-wrapped deep-fried cheese-stuffed pork chops. She, bless her heart, had been on my case for years to lose the weight. She saved my life at least three times, so I finally caved and opted in to her weight-loss program on April 1.
The concept is basically accountability, with side dishes of knowledge and medication. Every two weeks, I go to her office for a weigh-in, and to check on my general health. I get a prescription for the FDA approved appetite suppressant Phentermine, and a shot of vitamin B-12. At least, that’s what she tells me it is. It might be water, or it might be HGH. I figure I trust her; it’s probably the vitamin.
The Phentermine actually worked for the first two or three months, taking the edge off of those between-meal times and making it possible to wait for the next meal without snacking on, say, an ostrich-egg omelet with sausage and pancakes. Now, I think my body is onto it, and I’m hungry all the time.
She got me to look at calories and food groups more seriously. She put me on a 1600 calorie-a-day diet (just try it!), and I quickly realized the only way to ever really feel full is to eat a ton of green leafy vegetables. Instead of a banana for breakfast, half a banana. Instead of orange juice (pure sugar), an orange. Instead of mass quantities of cereal, a cup of Cheerios and half a cup of 1% milk. I began to realize something that every kid, including me, is taught in grade school health class: the body is a machine that runs on fuel. Food is the fuel. You put it in, and the body either has to burn it or store it as fat. You either eat only as much as you can burn in a pretty sedentary job (for my weight, about 1900 calories a day), or else you need to find ways not to be so sedentary. For me, that meant dusting off the treadmill we had bought a couple of years before, for starters. Then, I had to find the power switch.
So I started on the treadmill really slowly. I was used to walking about 3 to 3.5 miles in an hour, which is, and I never imagined it to be anything else, walking. I started off walking on the treadmill. After I got accustomed to it, I started using the “weight loss” cycle of the thing which goes like this: four minute warmup and four minute cool down at the beginning and end. In between, the machine varies the speed and incline, arcing upward by .5 mph every 30 seconds for two minutes, then arcing back downward. Now, after doing this for several months, I’m up to about 5.1 mph, which is jogging or running about 75% of the time, between 4.3 and 6.3 mph through the cycle. Not exactly Olympian, but a lot more beneficial than walking for an hour.
And, when I weighed in yesterday, I was 207, so I’ve lost 63 pounds. I’m wearing pants with a 37 waist, 6 or 7 inches less than 5 months ago. I’ve lost 2 inches in my neck, and am wearing size “large” clothes, not XL or bigger, for the first time since I was in my twenties. My target weight is 195. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s even possible, but I’m trying. I finally broke down and bought some new clothes; people were saying on Sundays that I looked like I was wearing someone else’s suit, like a kid dressing up like his dad. I tried to take it as a compliment, but it wasn’t intended that way.
So, here’s the ironic part. I’m probably healthier than I’ve been for most of my adult life, and everybody thinks I’m sick. They’ll say, “Hi! You’ve lost so much weight! Is it intentional?” I say, “Yes, I’ve really been working hard at it. I’m fine.” They say, “Are you sure?” It’s seems impossible that someone could have lost weight, be thinner, and wanted to do it, or not have lost it due to some horrible illness. Of course, it’s no secret that I had cancer, but thank God and Dr. Gott that seems to be gone. Irony number one: I’m well, but people keep asking me if I’m sick.
Irony number two: I’ve always been kind of a hedonist — well, not kind of. Look up “gourmand” in the dictionary, and my name is listed under “synonyms.” But now that I’ve had to discover ways of eating that are less sweet and juicy (i.e., full of sugars and fat), I’m finding that I’m more sensitive to the taste of things than ever, and everything tastes good to me. I’m fanatical, for instance, about carrots. Blackberries and blueberries this summer were a revelation. Coleslaw makes me cry. I used to use words like couscous, hummus, and tabbouleh as objects of ridicule; now, their part of my prayer life, usually preceded and followed by such holy ejaculations as, “O my God!” My idea of seafood a year ago was deep-fried shrimp in cocktail sauce, about a gallon of them. Last night, I made steamed tilapia on a bed of tomatoes and leeks and my mouth was (silently) doing an imitation of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. My idea of ethnic food last year was a dinner of cheese enchiladas, tacos, and tostadas. Last month, I made dolmas out of swiss chard leaves and brown rice, and they were fabulous.
My poor friends (and family) are so tired of me talking about losing weight, and recipes, and what I’d like to eat next. I just shake my head and wonder how my lovely doctor turned me from someone who once ordered a banana split and a martini from room service at 11:00 at night into someone who counts calories every meal on fitnessjournal.org and hasn’t had a martini for.... Gee, how long has it been? Since late winter, maybe. What keeps me from jumping off the wagon? The weigh-in, for now, with my doctor from Kerala who won’t be happy until I look like Gandhi.
The day will come, I know, when I imagine that the time is right, and I’ll be all ready to order a Grey Goose martini, cold as it can be, with a couple of bleu-cheese-stuffed olives. Then I’ll remember the electronic dominatrix that is my treadmill, biding its time in the basement dungeon of March Street. Every delicious drop of that martini will have to burn at upwards of 6 mph while I push my own weight up the mountain of my own hubris like a tubby Sisyphus, a mythical Irish daemon shaped like Jabba the Hutt. “No, no thanks,” I’ll manage to thirstily choke out to the waiter, then, cheerily adding, “bring me a sparkling water with ice and lemon instead.
Take that, you squeaky b*tch, I’ll mutter under my breath to the soulless cardio-Nazi in my basement. “And thanks, Doc,” I’ll add, without a crumb of irony, lifting a glass to Mini, my doctor, and Mini’s me, more than happy to be less than I was.

“Thy true religion in our hearts increase”

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:41:07 -0500

Friends of colleagues of mine in the “church biz” have been buzzing about the funeral of Senator Edward Kennedy, a liberal Catholic icon whose actions have dominated my political consciousness as much as any non-presidential politician since the mid-1960s. It has been easy to make the critique of the funeral liturgy celebrated because, aside from the celebrity of the deceased, his family, and the invitation-only attendees, it was as liturgically flawed and mawkishly homely as most of the hundreds of funerals I’ve attended over the years. We Catholics have a really, really good funeral liturgy. We just tend to be loath to impose it upon people in toto in their moment of grief. I’m not sure why, since we impose other laws and rites on them, but this just doesn’t seem the time. Or maybe we aren’t really sure about the resurrection, and this is just the time our lack of faith reveals itself. At any rate, let’s just say that the funeral was not our finest moment in really public worship. But it was not, by my estimate anyway, much worse than what most parishes perpetrate all the time. Focused on the accomplishments or personality of the deceased, we very often miss the opportunity to focus on the One who gives life to both the deceased and to us from the beginning of time to the end. It’s just the way we are. A memory of the beloved in hand is worth two anamneses in the theological bush.
But the weekend liturgy spoke, perhaps in an oblique way, to this issue. The equation set up in the gospel between true worship and just living brought this controversy to mind. There is very often in my hearing at the parish a false dichotomy set up between the law (in contemporary usage, meaning the liturgical law guiding ritual and church law in general) and real Christianity, which is somehow loving everybody and doing whatever we want with ritual so that our freedom as Christians isn’t unnecessarily constricted by the pettiness of rubrics. Some see liturgical law as parallel to the pharisaic dietary restrictions being challenged in the gospel story yesterday, as though following the rite of the Church or insisting that participation in the Eucharist is for the baptized were a “mere human precept” that can be swept aside by anyone who wants to for the purpose of not being “exclusionary.”
It’s certainly true that, built into the very fabric of Christianity, there is a tension between belonging (to an “in” group of those who have accepted the gospel) and mission (to serve and evangelize those not within the group.) The sense of baptismal belonging can easily degenerate into a mentality of “in” and “out”, a ghetto or parochial tunnel vision which segregates the Church from the world. The gospel has us keep reevaluating our vision, though, and helps us to see, when we have the courage to reflect upon it, that membership in the Church is a sacrament of the rest of life. As sacrament, it is a sign, a symbol with the weight of reality, of what our lives outside of the church milieu represent, and even more than that, of what God is doing in the world. God’s work is not restricted by the work of the Church, though to some extent the participation or non-participation of the Church in the enterprise of agape on God’s behalf does either promote or hinder the emergence of the empire of God.
Sunday’s gospel was set up by a passage from the Torah that assured us that observance of the law is wise and intelligent, a sign of our awareness of God’s nearness to us, and we are admonished that we in our careful observance we are not to “add to what I command you nor subtract from it.” Then, the responsorial psalm has us proclaim together the core of the law: “They who do justice will live in the presence of God.” The beginning of the letter of St. James, with characteristic practicality and directness, then said the following:
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
This great letter proclaims that religion and action are inseparable; that the truth of faith, that is, of God’s saving presence in the heart of the believer, is not simply confessional, internal, or a matter of “belonging,” but is a matter of action, a matter of being like God, and risking one’s own livelihood for the sake of the powerless and afflicted. The gospel, then, went on to admonish us about the way we want to condemn people who don’t follow our rules, like hungry people who eat without washing their hands:
“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.  You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.”
Jesus is always concerned that conversion precede discipline, that our desire to be “in” be informed by our commitment to God and the work of justice in the world. He does not, it seems to me, subscribe to the false dichotomy between law and love. He rather sees obedience to law as an outward expression of an interior reality, and that reality is the conviction, acted on in every aspect of life, that every other person is a beloved child of God to the very same extent that I am, and that my service of the other is my connection to the life of God. Agape is one. God is agape. As human beings, we keep order and pass on our beliefs about this very God through our rites and laws. But our adherence to them, and our way of passing on the laws, really must be informed by our conviction that others live in the all-encompassing sphere of divine favor, and that doing justice to others is underpinning truth of the Torah. And by justice, Torah means “the way God treats people,” or “the way things would be if the world were completely transformed into the reign of God.”
Getting back, then, to the Kennedy funeral: what does it say about some of us “Catholics” that we can do any better than criticize the music or the prayers at the funeral of a man whose public life was, in fact, devoted to the plight of widows and orphans and immigrants, whose passion was universal health care, education, and equality? Why does our conversation turn to the public “sins” of the man, the weakness, the bad judgment, bad choices, rather than to the extraordinary way in which he used his prodigious talent and influence to do the very things the gospel of Christ urges us to do? I’ve been embarrassed by some of the vitriol “Catholics” have lain on the late Senator in their blogs and comments on news stories. Where is the mercy, the non-judgment, the appreciation of gospel life?
Inaction brings its own judgment upon itself, as we know from Matthew 25. Those who think that their religion and its rites alone will count them among the blessed are in for a rude awakening, if we are to believe that parable (Mt. 25: 31-46). Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. There is no dichotomy between belonging and mission, between law and love, for those with ears to hear the gospel. Love informs law; belonging is for mission, which expands the circle of belonging. True religion is living in agape, the love-life of God, which only God can enable. Those who live in love live in God, even sinners. Even Senators.
Here’s what we sang at St. Anne yesterday:
Gathering: We Are Called (Haas) Gather
Psalm 15: Those Who Do Justice (Haas) Gather
Preparation Rite: O Beauty, Ever Ancient (O’Connor) (OCP octavo)
Communion: I Say Yes/Digo Sí, Señor (Peña)
Recessional: Anthem (Conry) (Gather)

Eucharist as sign and “foretaste of heaven”

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 20:19:45 -0500

Rethinking our idea of God, learning God’s ways based upon the Jesus of the gospels and not upon Baal or Zeus or the human emperors whose wealth and power we crave, will necessarily cause us to rethink our idea of what heaven is. It can help us get an idea of how the eucharist is a “foretaste of heaven,” since heaven, we imagine, describes the dwelling of God, or the realm or sphere of divine presence and influence. And I keep coming back to that hymn in Philippians that Paul quotes near the outset of that letter, “Though (Christ) was in the form of God, he did not imagine that equality with God was something to be hoarded. Instead, he emptied himself, and took the form of a slave.” Whatever else we say about God, it must include this central notion of our faith that God empties himself, does not cling to divinity, in order to love and serve. Clearly, already, heaven must be more like the kitchen than the banquet hall; more like the servants’ quarters than the throne room; in the image of the venerable British drama, more like downstairs than upstairs.
The god for whom Jesus was mistaken in the narrative of John 6 and in the other multiplication gospels enters history on a white horse to disrupt it, breaking the laws of physics, casting aside the harsh reality of laboring for daily bread, setting things right by giving everyone a winning lottery ticket and free meal pass. But Jesus had rejected that sort of messianic mission, as the stories of the temptations in the desert suggest. The God of Jesus is not like Pharaoh or Caesar, nor a magician who produces abundance ex nihilo. The true God enters history with all its unfairness, violence, and ungodliness, subverting it from within through solidarity with us, and showing us by example how the greedy and violent dynamics of history can be overcome by agape, the selfless solidarity of other-centeredness.
There is a familiar metaphor for heaven that works for me here. It’s an image in which heaven and hell are exactly alike, with people sitting across from each other at great banquet tables laden with rich food and drink. Angels bring plate after plate of wonderful dishes to the center of these tables. The trouble is, the forks are all three feet long. The people in hell are starving, the food is turning, because they can’t reach from their forks to their mouths to feed themselves. Those in heaven, on the other hand, are laughing and full, because they are feeding each other. They’ve learned the lesson of the kenotic Christ, who came “not to be served, but to serve.” He is the image of the invisible God.
In the letter to the Ephesians we heard Sunday, St. Paul asks believers to “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us.” To “live in love,” we have been shown by Jesus, is to serve the other person, to “enter history on behalf of the poor,” in Nathan Mitchell’s phrase, and not to cling to our correctness or status or imagined “goodness” if it gets in the way of solidarity with the other and putting the other’s needs above our own. Within the community, this means we ought to remove from our lives “all bitterness, fury, anger,Faithful Family, from Change Our Hearts. Click arrow to play, click here, or artwork, to go to iTunes. shouting, and reviling...along with all malice.” Imitating God means living in agape, which is focused upon the needs of the other at our own expense: “be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” To St. Paul, it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong, it only matters who does right, and doing right is a matter of imitating God, emptying ourselves into history “as Christ loved us and handed himself over to us.”
Solidarity with others at this level, being-like-God when God is a servant and not a despot, is a dangerous business. The food that strengthened Elijah in the desert (in the first reading) came to him because he was in flight from the persecution of Queen Jezebel and her husband, Ahab. Jesus and his disciple Paul both experience capital punishment at the hands of the empire. That having been said, this political nature of eucharistic life and solidarity among us is not a coercive or violent movement, but a movement of people who choose life. It surrenders rights, rather than claims them; this is how God is, not even hoarding the status of divinity, but surrendering divine right and rightness to be God-among-us. I say this as a way of countering any claim that the Eucharist is essentially a “spiritual” exercise: it is, quite to the contrary, a sign of the integrity of humanity, body and soul.
Maybe that’s why we have the Eucharist, finally, as a meal. It is God emptied into bread and wine, but it remains real food for real people, bodies and souls, confronted by and then surrendering to a divine presence that transforms us into someone we could never become on our own: Christ. In Christ, humanity becomes divine. But this is not to say that we rise to some new kind of superiority or splendor: it is to say that we are more and more transformed by agape into servants of the world. The sign and foretaste of heaven brings us ever closer to the dwelling place of God: with the human race. We arrive at the beginning, in Eliot’s phrase, and discover it for the first time. Christ, as he did with Zacchaeus, has come to stay in the house of a sinner. Our house. Heaven, the dwelling-place of God, is with the human race.
Here’s what we sang last week at St. Anne:
Gathering: Look Beyond (Dameans, Gather 843)
Psalm 34: Taste and See (Kendzia)
Preparation Rite: Blessed Are You (Haugen, Gather 588)
Communion: I Myself Am the Bread of Life (Cooney, Gather 824)
Recessional: All Are Welcome (Haugen, Gather 712)

looking beyond the manna and the man

Sun, 2 Aug 2009 15:02:58 -0500

At the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, recorded in some form in all four gospels, there is a story about the John-baptized Jesus being driven into the wilderness for trial. In the more detailed narratives, the evangelists tell of dialogue between Jesus and Satan, who, in one case, tries to get Jesus to turn rocks into loaves of bread. In these lessons in “how to be a bad messiah,” Satan attempts to make Jesus into the very kind of messiah that people will actually want, will root for: one who can feed them when they get hungry, rule over their rulers, and manipulate God into answering whatever prayer might be on their lips at the time. In every case, Jesus not only rejects the suggestion of the tempter, but, using God’s own word, demonstrates that the kind of actions Satan suggests were never God’s idea in the first place. Satan, foiled in this attempt to divert Jesus from his calling and from his elevated status as God’s beloved, goes away to try again later. “Later,” we are to understand, is the darkness of the cross.
The cluster of sayings and dialogues gathered and redacted into the sixth chapter of John are dense and weighted with references to the feeding of the Hebrews wandering in the desert with manna, “bread from heaven.” What does “bread from heaven” mean? Is it like “pennies from heaven,” a kind of panis ex machina that is like winning the hunger lottery? I think to answer this question, we have to come to terms with what kind of God it is whom we worship. If “heaven” is the abode of God, or the sphere of divine influence, then the kind of God we worship will determine much about what heaven is like. For instance, if we believe in a God in the likeness of a human monarch, then heaven will be somehow like a castle, with royal attendants, rich fixtures, a throne, “golden crowns upon the glassy sea,” and so forth. But what if, as I have often been advocating here and in my music (not my own idea, but gleaned from other readings)“Look Beyond,” by the Dameans. Click here to go to GIA’s website for more information, or click arrow below to hear a clip. that Jesus Christ “is the image of the invisible God,” and that our best glimpse of God, and therefore of heaven, is to consider Christ himself? Might not, in the end, this be something like what Jesus means when he says, in words laden with connotative references to the exodus narrative, “I AM the living bread which has come down from heaven”? In other words, My work is the work of the God of Exodus, the living God, the God of freedom and equality. Abba gives me to the world, as Abba gave the manna in the desert to your ancestors. To be fully alive is to take me inside of you, to take me to your heart, to become who I am. This, too, is the gift of Abba.”
Jesus keeps urging the crowd to “look beyond” Moses, and see that the wonder worker was doing the work of the One who led them out of Egypt. In the same way, he wants the crowd, along with both his disciples and detractors, to see that it is God who feeds them. And how did God accomplish this? Are we to believe that, after a miraculous multiplication of food in front of thousands of people, there would still be incredulity? Well, we are a tough crowd; I suppose it’s (barely) possible. But what kind of God would be revealed in such a miracle, a god who feeds this crowd, today, and another one? Not a hungrier one, for instance, of which there are plenty. Wouldn’t such a miracle reveal a god who breaks all the rules set up at creation for a moment of glory? Being this kind of messiah, wouldn’t Jesus just be doing what Satan had tempted him to do in the desert, when he reprimanded the Divider by saying, “People don’t live on bread alone”? Isn’t it more likely, as some have imagined, that the preaching of Jesus about the empire of God, about an alternative to greed, gain-centered labor, war and competitiveness in the invitation to live in agape, might have moved the crowd to open its burses and pockets, stimulated by the sight of a boy surrendering his five loaves and two fishes, to share their food with one another?
What kind of bread, from what kind of “heaven”, might that be? What God might dwell in a heaven that is other people, that is a spirit of shared life, that is about acknowledged mutual value and equality as children of one family? Wouldn’t that kind of bread feed more than just the belly; yes, the belly, but also the heart and soul?
The paschal mystery of God, I submit to you, demands that kind of bread. It is not bread that changes our life like a winning lottery ticket, but it’s bread that changes our life like spring rain and sunlight, spread over the whole earth so that the earth itself brings forth enough for everyone. It’s bread that changes everyone’s life. The God whom we worship as a community of persons in eternal mutual surrender and service is revealed by a messiah who turns a crowd of hungry seekers into a table of plenty.
In the Buddhist parable, the seeker is warned not to miss the moon’s beauty by concentrating on the finger pointing at the moon. Jesus’s message to the crowds is much the same: it’s not the food that is so important, and it’s not even the one who brings it to the table. What’s important is the God who sends the bread from heaven. Knowing that God, knowing the divine economy of abundance that shines out when we stop coveting and hoarding and praying for a miracle and start opening our picnic baskets and sharing, that is the important thing. Looking beyond the gift to the giver, sharing the bread from that heaven, we begin, in St. Augustine’s beautiful words, to become what we eat, not through any work of our own, but because the Holy Spirit fills the bread of agape with the very life of God.“I Am the Bread of Life,” by S. Suzanne Toolan, arr. RC. Click here to go to iTunes, or on artwork. Click arrow to hear clip.
What we sang at St. Anne’s yesterday:
Gathering: Table of Plenty (Schutte, OCP)
Psalm 23: The Lord Prepares a Banquet (Cooney, NALR/OCP)
Preparation: Taste and See (Kendzia, OCP)
Communion: I Am the Bread of Life (Toolan, GIA)
Recessional: Lift Up Your Hearts (O’Connor, OCP/New Dawn)

it takes a village to pitch a no-no (or feed 5,000)

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:08:21 -0500

In Mark’s gospel, there are two feedings of multitudes. One takes place in Jewish territory, the other in the Greek territory, the Decapolis, on the other side of the lake. It is this second feeding for which the lectionary substitutes the John 6 story and continues with the rest of John 6 for several weeks. The first feeding takes place between the pericopes we heard a few weeks ago about the healing of the two women (the woman with the hemorrhage and the 12-year-old) and the calming of the sea, and it is skipped by the lectionary compilers, no doubt because of the amount of time being spent on the John’s version. But there are some things we ought to ask ourselves about the Mark feedings, like, why two? What’s different about the (earlier) Mark versions of the story?
My thoughts as I listened to the gospel yesterday were about meaning, as the homilist told us that theologians had grappled with the meaning of this miracle from the beginning. From the beginning is exactly right, as all we need to do is look at Mark’s narrative of the aftermath of the first feeding to see that the meaning of it, like the meaning of most of what Jesus was about, was lost on the ones who witnessed it. (This is no condemnation, by the way, as all of us have pretty much lost the meaning of it even today.) In chapter 6, Mark tells the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Then the disciples get on the boat and head over to the Decapolis. This is when the storm blows up and Jesus walks to them across the water. Mark then says this:
...when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out. They had all seen him and were terrified. But at once he spoke with them, "Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid!" He got into the boat with them and the wind died down. They were (completely) astounded. They had not understood the incident of the loaves.
One could understand “they had not understood...” to refer to the divine power of Jesus in the multiplication, which they should have transferred to his power over the sea. But when I think of this gospel as arising from a community in the crucible of the destruction of Jerusalem and the passing of the torch of discipleship to a generation that had not known Jesus personally, it strikes me that another meaning might be intended. What is the meaning of the incident of the loaves?
This story in John, if not in all the gospels, is certainly meant to recall the feeding of Israel with manna in Exodus. The “bread from heaven,” the bread of life, was the food that kept Israel alive and together during their sojourn in the desert. The bread was a sign of God among them, and that assurance forged them into a people. In both wilderness settings, in the context of both “miracles,” there is the grumbling, the uneasy protests of those unable to summon the faith of gratitude. In both stories there is the possibility of a “natural” miracle: some kind of pollen in the case of manna; some extraordinary preaching-induced sharing by the multitude with Jesus. In both stories there is the extraordinary dialectic between the abundance of God (all have enough, there is enough to store and share), and the equality of the gift (no one has more than they need.)
The “miracle” of the perfect game, as Mark Buehrle knows and has said in so many words on the dozens of appearances he’s made in the last few “(I Myself Am the) Bread of Life,” from Change Our Heartsdays, is not the work of one man, no matter how extraordinarily talented he might be, but the work of a “village,” or a team. No pitcher can win a game if his team doesn’t score a run. Unless he can manage to strike out twenty-seven consecutive batters (a feat that has still never been accomplished at the major league level), he depends on the rest of his team for the ordinary and extraordinary defensive work that they do day after day in winning and losing. Certain Buehrle needed to send a case of beer to Sox center fielder Dewayne Wise for his game-saving catch at the wall in the 8th inning!
What is the meaning of the loaves? I think it has to do with God’s abundance, with a divine strategy of grace that requires a surrender to equality and cooperation. It means that there is enough if we all stop hoarding, more than enough, enough to have some left over, 12 baskets full, enough until the “twelfth of never,” enough forever. Team Humanity’s perfect game will happen when we are inspired, in-Spirit-ed, so that we surrender to the divine plan of mutuality and interdependence, letting go of our need to hoard for ourselves and our ability to ignore the desperation and need of those around us. The meaning of the loaves is that whether we’re lost in the desert, or hungry in the wilderness, or on a boat in a storm, God is with us, Christ is with us, and we are together. And it will enough.
That’s not everything there is to know about the meaning of the loaves, of course, but I think it’s part of it. And, like everything in the gospel, it seems to be easier said than done. To me, at least, it’s something to hope for, something worth believing in.