SpiritMatters Monthly August 2009

Tell me your story...

I am willing to bet that most people at some point in their lives have had a “religious” experience. Whether it was a very strange coincidence, a vision, a revelation, a premonition or some other mysterious occurrence, most of us can identify an event or experience that has defied rational explanation. What is truly fascinating to me is not that people have these experiences, but how reluctant they usually are to talk about them. Even the clergy and religious, those whom we might expect to be the most open and understanding of mystical experiences, often prove to be very tight-lipped about experiences that do not fit or may challenge the prevailing religious attitudes at the time. We all want to be considered reasonable, rational people, so when we have experiences that challenge our view of the world, we are likely to suppress them or keep them to ourselves, rather than talk about them and risk being labeled an eccentric or a fanatic.

We often define religious communities as groups of people that share a common belief. Long before the term “catholic” was used to describe Christians of a particular denomination, it was used to refer to those Christians which upheld the general or universal beliefs of the entire church. What the church, and other religious communities, often forget though, is that those things which are now considered universal beliefs, often began as someone’s individual experience. A good example of this phenomenon is the Feast of the Transfiguration, celebrated by Christians in the catholic tradition on August 6th. The story is told that Peter, James, and John followed Jesus to the top of a mountain, where his image was mysteriously transformed and Moses and Elijah suddenly appeared at his side. Since 1456, the Transfiguration has been celebrated as a major feast of the church; parishes have been named after this event and it has been depicted in countless works of art. The story has been retold so often that it has become a part of the common belief of many Christians. But what we often forget is that this story which is now a part of the common belief of many, actually began as the private experience of a very few. Only three individuals actually experienced the Transfiguration, and yet now it is a celebrated feast of the entire catholic tradition.

The Transfiguration is just one of the many examples I could give of the experiences of a few becoming the beliefs of the many. I don’t think that this phenomenon is peculiar to the Christian religion, but rather a tendency of most religions although we may frequently overlook it. How might our lives change if we lived constantly aware that we owe our most cherished beliefs to the experiences of others? How might we value our own experiences if we realized how meaningful they might be to someone else? What would happen if we combed through our religions and got rid of every story or every belief that wasn’t accepted by everyone else? What would we be left with? Not much I would venture to say. Our lives and our faiths are made richer by the stories of others. The Transfiguration is a pretty weird story, but if I am honest, probably not that much weirder than some things I have experienced in my life. Part of why I love my job is that it affords me the opportunity to listen to the religious stories of others and that has enriched my life immeasurably. What’s your story?

SpiritMatters Monthly July 2009

No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes I believe in me
So you believe in you

It’s funny how rumors get started. Sometimes they are the result of innocent mistakes; sometimes they are the result of nosey speculation; sometimes they are out and out sinister and meant to do harm. Rumors are always the result of us trying to know more than what we have been told. Rumors could in fact be labeled “things we don’t know.” If you have ever had one told about you then you might realize just how damaging they can be and the damage can be almost impossible to repair, even if the rumors are eventually proved to be untrue. The recent death of Michael Jackson has drawn much public attention to the effect that rumors and rumor telling can have on one’s life and career. The more famous a person is, or the more eccentric they are, the more likely we are to believe just about anything someone says about them, especially if the person saying it claims to speak from a position of authority (e.g., a reporter, a religious leader, or a “personal acquaintance”). This isn’t a new phenomenon at all, but is actually as old as humanity. Much has been written in recent years about the Church’s so-called suppression of the Gnostic Gospels (several different collections of sayings or stories attributed to Jesus of Nazareth that were shared by certain communities after his death), but what the early church leaders were trying to do by developing a list of accepted scriptures and creating a creed of basic beliefs, was to limit what was being said about Jesus to those things which they felt they could reasonably assert to be true. In essence, what the early church tried to do was exert a bit of rumor control, albeit in an imperfect and sometimes heavy-handed manner. Humans are curious creatures though, and we love to speculate about things we don’t know and religious leaders have proved to be no exception to this rule.

Sometime in the late 4th century, Pope Gregory I gave a sermon in which he linked two female characters from scripture: Mary Magdalene, and another woman typically described as a “sinner” or an “adulteress.” It didn’t matter that there was no link in the scriptures between these two characters, nor did it matter that the Pope was only presenting this as an opinion of his own and not a tenent of the faith; the die was cast, the rumor had begun, and for over 1400 years Mary Magdalene would be thought of in the Western Church as a prostitute. But even
those that have fought to vindicate Mary from the rumor of being a prostitute, haven’t stopped from spreading equally, if not more spurious, rumors about her themselves: everything from being a wealthy patroness, a priest, or even the romantic consort or wife of Jesus. Mary Magdalene has been the subject of so many recently published books, that among the saints she has achieved pop star status herself, and yet so much of what has been written about her is based purely on speculation or rumor. In our age of mass media, where every aspect of everyone’s life seems to be open to public scrutiny, it can become increasingly hard to reconcile ourselves to the fact that some things we will never know. When people’s private lives are treated like public property, we are prone to forget that some things are indeed none of our business. We aren’t meant to know everything about everyone. I am convinced that life is better that way.
It was remarkable for me to watch the response to Michael Jackson’s death. It seems that for a couple of days people were able to push aside all the rumors about his eccentricities and just focus on that which he truly offered us: his music, his dancing and his creativity. What if we did the same for Mary Magdalene? What if we ignored all the salacious rumors and conspiracy theories and focused only on what she gave to us: the first proclamation of the Resurrection. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of making up stories about other people, we could just focus on how other people have contributed to our own story? How wonderful would it be not to be burdened by all the drama in other’s lives, but to feel truly free to live and experience our own lives? Humans, according to the Judeo-Christian Tradition, are made in the image of God. If God still remains a mystery to us, then it should come as no surprise that humans reflect a bit of that mystery as well.

May we all learn to embrace our own mystery.


Blessings,

Fr. Kevin

The sea is his and he made it...

Perched as we are atop Bergen Hill, Christ Hospital has one of the most tremendous views of any hospital in the country. On a clear day we can see almost everything from the Verrazano Bridge up to Midtown Manhattan and beyond. Before our eyes stands one major human accomplishment after another: the Empire State Building, the Holland Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge; all of them major engineering triumphs in their day and all of them testaments to our power to overcome obstacles. And yet, just beyond the Verrazano Bridge lies the immense Atlantic Ocean, perhaps as a reminder that no matter what we accomplish as humans, we will always be surrounded by a force much greater than us.

If you ride the Ferris wheel in Coney Island you can look in one direction and see the busy, teeming life of our vast metropolis; in the other direction you see what appears to be a vast nothingness of endless water. The city appears as a beacon of energy and light standing in opposition to the darkness of the great ocean; but of course, we know that this is just how it appears. The truth is that the ocean contains far more energy and life than our city could ever imagine. It’s not a vast nothingness at all, but a vital, life-giving force, without which our lives, as well as all our accomplishments, would be impossible. I think that our relationship with the ocean is perfectly symbolic of our relationship with God: that which on the surface appears to be empty and lifeless, is actually the very source of our lives. And while the ocean can be a source of great joy, especially now that summer is upon us, we also know that it has to be respected. Just as the sea is far more powerful and complex than we could ever imagine, so too is God.

There is an ancient story told about Saint Augustine of Hippo: as Augustine was walking along the beach one day trying to understand the Holy Trinity he saw a little boy running back and forth up and down the beach. The boy was dipping water from the ocean in a seashell and running up the beach to pour it into a hole that he had dug. Augustine asked the little boy what he was doing and he replied: “I am going to pour the whole ocean into this whole!” Augustine laughed and said: “Son, you will never be able to get the entire ocean into that little hole.” Undaunted, the little boy replied: “I have a better chance of getting the ocean into this hole than you do of understanding the Holy Trinity and God” and went right back to filling his hole. Trying to understand God can be a lot like trying to pour the ocean into a little hole: it is an impossible task, but with both God and the ocean, just because we can’t move it or fully comprehend it, doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate its beauty or respect its power. May you be able to spend some time this summer contemplating the force that creates and sustains your life; it is that creative force which gives us the power to make creations of our own.

Blessings,

Fr. Kevin

SpiritMatters Monthly May 2009

There is a wonderful episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa spies on her older brother Bart praying to get out of a test and states: “Prayer: The last refuge of a scoundrel.” Lisa, who was misquoting Samuel Johnson, still makes the point that many people only turn to prayer as a last resort after every device of their own has been exhausted. Bart wanted his desires granted, and if forced to he would even pray for them. Now we may not all be scoundrels, but I do think that there is a strong tendency for us to misplace the role of prayer in our lives. Rather than praying daily for continued health and vitality, we wait until we become gravely ill and then pray for a miracle; rather than praying for God to meet our needs, we decide first what our needs are and then become frustrated when God doesn’t give us what we want; or even worse, God does give us what we want, only for us to discover that it’s not actually what we needed.

When it comes to prayer many of us have a strong tendency to treat God like a genie in a bottle: there more for granting wishes than for granting wisdom. In ancient Greek plays there is a plot device called a deus ex machina, in which a character playing a god is dropped onto the stage from out of nowhere and solves all of the characters’ problems. Perhaps it is human nature, but I think we often expect God to be like that Greek character: coming around only to fix the unfixable and leaving the rest to us.

Despite all of the apocalyptic things we read and see on television, there has been a strong tendency in the Judeo-Christian traditions, and in many pagan traditions as well, to push against this idea of God only being concerned with the beginning and end of life and nothing in between. The Psalms are beautiful examples of mankind petitioning God to be present, not just to our needs, but also to our joys and sorrows. Many of the stories of the patriarchs and prophets from the Hebrew Scriptures are meant to show that God is not just a puller-of-strings, but a vibrant life-force in the midst of a faithful people. According to tradition, King David, the poet to whom many of the psalms are ascribed, was born and died on the feast of Shavuot, a festival that celebrates the harvest and the Torah (or God’s provision of material and spiritual blessings). It was on this feast of Shavuot that the early followers of Jesus Christ experienced God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, also known as the Paraclete, or the helper. This gift, which is celebrated today as the Christian feast of Pentecost, was a clear demonstration to this community of faithful people that God wished to be a dynamic life and wisdom giving force in their lives and not just a detached observer and judge. The idea that God is present to us and is our helper in everyday life has guided the Church in its understanding and use of prayer. Asking God to provide for our needs was seen as such an important practice that the Church designated a few days in the year to be specific Rogation Days (in Latin the word rogare means: to ask). These days often involved parishes processing around their community and their fields with their clergy asking for God’s protection and provision for the needs of the community. To many modern Christians processions (with the possible exception of funeral processions), may seem like a quaint relic of a bygone age, but they do make an important statement: God is not hiding in our churches and chapels, aloof and uninterested in our daily lives and needs. No, processions make the statement that God is alive and in the world and in our streets and hallways. Processions claim that God is present to everyone that has needs, not just to the regular church-goer. While of course we should always pray whenever and wherever the need arises, there is something to be said for having special moments when we recognize the value and importance of regular prayer. The psalms, like Rogation Day processions, remind us that God hears the cries of those in distress, but they also show us by example that first and foremost prayer ought to be an act of devotion, not desperation.

May it be so.

Blessings,
Fr. Kevin

SpiritMatters Monthly April 2009

Out of death, into life...

T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” begins with the, now, famous line:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

April can be a month of strong contrasts: the cold of winter gives way to the warmth of spring; the austerity of Lent is transformed into the joy of Easter. The Earth, which in our part of the world has appeared barren or dead for months, now seems to spring to life again, or at least it tries to, but if you have spent much time in the Northeast, then undoubtedly you have seen snow fall on or around Easter. April can be a tease that way: offering us the promise of a warm and sunny spring, and then immediately taking it back again. Perhaps that is why Eliot saw April as the cruelest month: because it offers us the hope of a beautiful new world, but doesn’t allow us to live in it completely, at least not yet. Human nature frequently makes us want to skip over many of the less pleasant aspects of life, which is perhaps why many of our religious traditions force us to look at life’s more painful moments: so that we may know the true cost of joy, and the true value of it. The Jewish festival of Passover and the Christian observances of Holy Week both encourage their participants to remember a painful and traumatic time in the history of their people (for Jews being slaves in Egypt, for Christians witnessing the execution of Jesus), so that they may view their present joys in the light of those traumatic events: to understand freedom, we must know slavery; to understand life, we must know death. Ritual and tradition are how one generation communicates this understanding with the next.

On April 21st thousands of young people will gather together in Poland to make a very special journey. This special event, called “The March of the Living,” is a silent walk between the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau which takes place on Yom Ha’Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. For over twenty years young Jews have gathered together to take this walk, which for many of their relatives and ancestors would have been a march to their deaths. Participants must take a close look at one of the most horrific moments in human history in order to truly appreciate what it means to walk away from that place alive and free. It is no accident that Yom Ha’Shoah occurs shortly before Israeli Independence Day: again to understand freedom, we must first understand slavery. “The March of the Living” is not just a solemn remembrance though; it is a call to awareness. While the march may be symbolic of one people’s victory over a force bent on destroying them, it is also a warning that the battle is not completely over yet. Anti-Semitism, intolerance and prejudices of various kinds still exist and still must be fought, not just in other people, but also in ourselves. Christians likewise witness Christ on the cross year after year saying “It is finished,” and yet somehow they realize that the story is far from over. We live in that perennial April, where, like Moses, we have been allowed to see the Promised Land, but not live in it. April is very much about the journey from where we have been to where we hope to be. Perhaps that is why another English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, saw April as the month that inspired his pilgrims to begin their sacred journey to Canterbury:

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought to the root and all
And bathed every vein in liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has with his sweet breath,
Filled again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and leaves, and the young sun
His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in distant lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury went,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak


Blessings,

Fr. Kevin

SpiritMatters Monthly March 2009

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?

We like to think of time as being something that is more or less constant. Hours, days, months and years seem to pass with seemingly little or no effort on our part, so we tend to assume that they are unchangeable and beyond our control. The truth is, that while days and seasons may come and go without our interference, how we mark time is something that humans are largely responsible for. Many centuries ago, a monk living in Rome decided that he wanted to come up with a better way to calculate the future dates of Easter. The church had been using an old Roman dating system that numbered its years according to the reign of an emperor (e.g., the fourth year in the reign of Augustus). The church had been using a chart to find the date of Easter that dated everything from the reign of the emperor Diocletian, who persecuted the Christians. Since the monk did not want to continue to memorialize a tyrant, he developed a new method of keeping the date based upon his estimation of the year of Christ’s birth. The fact that the majority of the world calls this year the year 2009, is directly the result of this one monk trying to focus our memory on a blessed event, rather than a painful one. There is a little known twist to this story though: the first year did not begin on the 1st of January as we might expect, but on the 25th of March. Why? Because the 25th of March is the Feast of the Annunciation, the date when the church remembers the announcement of the archangel Gabriel to Mary that she was carrying God’s child. The grace of God began, according to this monk, not when Christ was born, nor at the Resurrection, but the moment the seed was planted, thus the first year of grace began, not when the benefits could be seen and realized, but when the change was started. We humans are an impatient lot by nature: whether we are talking about the government’s economic stimulus plan or our hospital’s plan to improve quality and put patients first, in either case we want to see the benefits of our actions right away. We too often are more concerned with outcomes than with the process used to achieve them. A wise doctor once wrote that “only bad things happen quickly.” Well, perhaps not only bad things happen quickly, but looking back at how quickly our country’s economic situation changed and looking forward to how long it is likely to take us to recover, we can see the doctor’s point: good things frequently involve a process and usually take time. Christians frequently think of the Incarnation as something that takes place on Christmas Eve, but the truth is that Christ’s birth, just like any other birth, was a process that took nine months. We are used to looking for God on occasions like Christmas and Easter, those times where we can point specifically to what God has done, but the message Mary received was quite different: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The Lord was with Mary at the very beginning of the process, when she could not have been sure of the outcome or what this would mean for her life. God is with us when change begins, not just when we can see its blessings. One of the central themes we can see running throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptures is that we are results-oriented people trying to worship a process-oriented God. And yet, that one monk living in Rome so many centuries ago was able to see that God was with us at the very beginning of change. That one instant when something new was begun was so important that he felt that all time should begin from that point. Eventually January went back to being the first month of the year, but we still maintain this monk’s numbering system. Whether we are worried about the economy, our hospital, or our personal lives, may the greetings of the angel: “the Lord is with you” be a reminder to us that God is with us through the pains of the process and may we also take to heart the angel’s second message: “do not be afraid.”

Blessings,

Fr. Kevin

SpiritMatters Monthly February 2009

Lord lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...

When I was a young seminary student I had a dog named Denali who shared a great love of mine: books. While I enjoyed reading them, she enjoyed eating them, particularly, for some reason, religious books. I may have been reading the great theological ideas of the past two thousand years, but she was the one who was digesting them. Try as I might to hide my new prayer books, or bibles, or liturgical manuals, she always managed to find them and reduce them to pulp. Living with Denali was frustrating, even infuriating at times, but she taught me an important lesson: to find peace in this life and to hold on to it, you have to be prepared to let go of the things you love; even the things you love very much. While I eventually made peace with the fact that life with Denali would mean that I would have to be willing to sacrifice many of my material possessions, not to mention time, money and sleep, I was still not prepared for the greatest sacrifice which I was going to have to make.

At some point a few years ago Denali suddenly became very ill, and despite numerous veterinary treatments, eventually I had to let her return to the God who brought her into my life. As I sit here writing this I can look across the room and see a bookshelf full of half-eaten, or at least badly chewed books left over from my years with her. I would gladly get rid of all of them to have my dog back, but sadly, life doesn’t work that way. No, perhaps the harshest reality of life is that it calls us at times to let go of the things we love the most: our possessions, our freedom, our loved ones and yes, eventually even our own lives. There is a familiar story in the Christian scriptures where a young man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies by telling him some of the basic commandments (not stealing, loving your neighbor as yourself, etc.). The young man, still unsatisfied, petitioned Jesus again saying that he has kept the commandments, yet still feels unprepared to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus then replied (I’m paraphrasing here) that if you want to be more prepared to enter the kingdom of heaven give away all your stuff and follow me. The young man went away grieving because he was quite wealthy. This is where Jesus makes the famous statement “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Jesus isn’t condemning rich people, nor is he condemning possessions. What I think that Jesus is trying to teach this young man is that if you want to have some level of peace in this life, and if you want to prepare yourself for entering into the next life, then you must learn to let go of things, not because they are evil or bad, but because the reality of life is that sometimes we have to sacrifice the things we love, and sometimes the things we love are taken from us.

The Christian season of Lent begins this month, and like the Muslim season of Ramadan or the Jewish Passover, followers of the faith are often asked to give something up or abstain from something that they normally enjoy. I used to be quite skeptical of the practice of giving things up during Lent, because it always seemed like an artificial way of punishing ourselves for all the bad things we did the rest of the year. Why give something up for Lent if you are only going to take it back come Easter morning? At least, that’s what I used to think. Now I’m beginning to believe that giving things up during Lent isn’t so much about self-denial or self-punishment as it is about the practice of letting go. We give up things not because they are bad, or because we are bad; we give up things because we need to learn how to let go of the things we love.

February begins with the Feast of the Presentation, an ancient celebration of the Church which tells the story of Mary and Joseph going to the temple to give thanks to God for the safe delivery of their newborn child. The priest, named Simeon, blesses God for such a wonderful gift, but then he offers a strange warning for Mary: “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” Why did Simeon make this statement? Perhaps because he predicted that someday Mary would be forced to give back to God this precious child which she loved so much. Giving up something we love can sometimes feel like a knife through the heart, especially when what we love is another person (or in my case, a beloved pet). Giving up material things isn’t always easy either. The recent economic slump has caused many of us to sacrifice things in our life which we were fond of. Sometimes we choose to give things up; sometimes the choice is made for us. If we want any peace in this life at all, we have to learn how to let go of things. Many Christians give things up during Lent with the full intention of running right back to them come Easter Sunday. I used to think that this was somewhat hypocritical, but now I realize that it is perfectly symbolic of the Christian hope: come the Resurrection, those things which we have had to give up in life will be joyfully returned to us.
May all of us, regardless of our faith, live in the hope that the sacrifices we make now are only for a season.

Blessings,

Fr. Kevin