SpiritMatters Monthly February 2010

Dust thou art,

And unto dust shalt thou return.

A couple weeks ago I was walking through Union Square when I happened upon a young man putting the final touches upon a huge sand mandala that he had made on the sidewalk. Sand mandalas are a Tibetan Buddhist tradition whereby colored sand is used to create a large circle or wheel with extremely intricate designs within it. I have seen sand mandalas made several times. The first time was by a team of Buddhist monks that spent an entire week painstakingly placing sand grain by grain into the pattern. It is amazing to see just how careful the monks are with their work and sand mandalas are usually amazing works of art, but they are not merely art. This is a beautiful creation with an important lesson to teach. As soon as the sand mandala is finished it may be ritually blessed and then, much to the horror of many onlookers, it is swept away. Sand mandalas are meant to be an object of great beauty for only a moment and their destruction emphasizes the Buddhist belief in the transitory nature of the material world. The used sand is scooped up and poured into a nearby river never to be used again. Regardless of how beautiful or complicated this piece of art appears, its creator always reminds us that it is made from the same stuff we sweep off our floors everyday: sand. After looking at the young man’s mandala for a few moments, I went on about my business. By the time I had returned from getting a cup of coffee at a nearby café, the mandala was gone, with scarcely a trace that it had ever been there at all.
Of course, you don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognize that the material world is fleeting. Every year millions of Christians mark their foreheads with ashes as both a sign of penitence and as solemn reminder of their mortality. The ashes are all that remain of the palm branches from Palm Sunday the previous year. The palm branches, which to Christians are a reminder of Jesus of Nazareth’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, are completely burned until there is nothing left but carbon. This carbon is then pressed upon a person’s head with the memorable words: “remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” It is a stark reminder that human life, no matter how complex or intricate it may be, can like that sand mandala be swept away in a moment.
The sand and the ashes are not just meant to remind us that life is short though: for the Tibetan Buddhist the sand designs are meant to portray eternal spiritual realities and the pouring of the sand into the water is meant to bring healing and blessing into this world, for the Christian the ashes are a sign of belief in an eternal world beyond this physical one and they are a reminder that what we do in this temporary world matters in that eternal one. Both the sand and the ashes are physical symbols of an important spiritual truth: life is about more than the stuff it is made out of. Beautiful things may fade away, or be swept away, but beauty never can. May we be able to appreciate the beautiful things in our life, but never lose sight of the true eternal beauty which lies behind them.

SpiritMatters Monthly January 2010

With the Lord one day is as a thousand years,
And a thousand years one day.

Dogs, for all of their amazing abilities, cannot tell time. A dog might know when it is time to eat, or when it is time to sleep, but it gets these cues from its environment, not from the clock on the wall. A dog might even know about when you will be getting home, but it can’t tell you how long you have been gone. This is why many dogs seem just as happy to see you after you have been gone one hour as after you have been gone for six. Clocks (and their hours, minutes and seconds) are simply not a meaningful part of a dog’s world.
Humans, on the other hand, worship clocks. Don’t believe me? Just turn on your TV every December 31st.

Of course, clocks aren’t the only time-telling devices that humans worship: we love calendars too. January marks the beginning of a new calendar year and thus for many of us, means it is time to buy a new calendar. I have three calendars on my desk at work, two at home, one in my computer and one in my phone. I have a hard time imagining what my life would be like if I didn’t have something in front of me telling me what day it is today, what I’m supposed to be doing, and what I’m likely to be doing tomorrow.

Calendars can be very useful devices; at their best they can help us remember and celebrate meaningful events. They can help us to manage our time and number our days so that those things that are the most important get the most attention. Calendars should help us live our lives, not just eat them away one day at a time. Long ago, before the average person even owned a calendar, priests would stand before their parishioners on January the 6th (the Feast of the Epiphany) and sing to them the dates of the major feasts of the following year. Here the average person was given the opportunity to look ahead at the coming year and at least mentally set apart those great observances wherein his or her time belonged to God and no other.

Now is the time, while our calendars are still fresh and uncluttered, to look ahead and take note of those things which we wish to observe in the coming year. Have we blocked off time to participate in our faith communities? Have we set aside time for rest and vacation? Have we
planned to do anything fun and exciting in the coming year? Take the time to do what is truly important, or the unimportant things will take the time away from you. Tell your calendar what is important in your life before it tells you.

We have all grown so dependent on clocks and calendars to order our daily lives that we often forget that they are a human creation, not a divine one. Clocks and calendars are our attempt to impose order on the universe, but they are likely to be far more important to us than they are to God; after all, time takes on a very different meaning if you aren’t sitting on a planet spinning around the Sun. Just because we have set aside time for God, doesn’t mean that God is bound to act according to our schedule. God doesn’t wear a watch. We set aside time to allow ourselves to see how God is continually working in our lives, not to force God’s hand. Setting aside time for God is a ritual practice that reminds us that we forget him more than he forgets us. God can and will enter into our lives even at the most inconvenient times. Sometimes it seems like God is always leaving everything to the last minute, but then when you are in control of the universe I guess there’s no need to be in a hurry. Dealing with a deity that can’t tell time can be frustrating, as the psalmist frequently reminds us (“How long, oh Lord”), but it can also give us great hope: hope that God, like a dog, will be filled with joy every time we return and not care so much about how long we have been away.

Blessings,

Fr. Kevin

SpiritMatters Monthly December 2009

"Mark my footsteps, good my page. Tread thou in them boldlyThou shalt find the winter's rage freeze thy blood less coldly."

There is a legend about a 10th century Duke of Bohemia (the modern day Czech Republic) that claims that the man was so pious and generous that even his footsteps provided warmth for those that followed him. This Duke, who was sainted after his death, is known to most English-speaking Christians as “Good King Wenceslas,” the hero in the popular Christmas carol of the same name:

Good King Wenceslas last looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shone the moon that night, tho' the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight, gath'ring winter fuel.

"Hither, page, and stand by me, if thou know'st it, telling,

Yonder peasant, who is he? Where and what his dwelling?"

"Sire, he lives a good league hence, underneath the mountain;

Right against the forest fence, by Saint Agnes' fountain."

"Bring me flesh, and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither:

Thou and I will see him dine, when we bear them thither."

Page and monarch, forth they went, forth they went together;

Through the rude wind's wild lament and the bitter weather.

"Sire, the night is darker now, and the wind blows stronger;

Fails my heart, I know not how; I can go no longer."

"Mark my footsteps, good my page. Tread thou in them boldly

Thou shalt find the winter's rage freeze thy blood less coldly.

"In his master's steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;

Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

The setting of this carol is not Christmas Day, but the day after Christmas, which is the Feast of Saint Stephen. Saint Stephen is regarded as the first martyr of the Christian Church and one of its first deacons. Stephen’s task was to serve the widows in the early church and make sure that they got the food that they needed. Stephen was falsely accused of blasphemy and stoned to death by religious leaders who envied his gifts of ministry. The Feast of Stephen has been celebrated on December 26th since the 4th century, or roughly from the time that the Church started celebrating Christmas on December 25th. Why have these two feasts been linked for so long? It is easy for us to get caught up in the story of the Nativity and miss the profound significance of the greater story that is being told. We often think of children dressed as shepherds doing church plays or of the joy and innocence of kids opening toys on Christmas morning, but lest we become too enchanted by the joy and revelry, the Feast of Stephen is right there to remind us that faith and religion are anything but child’s play. Sometimes showing love to others comes at a cost far greater than any credit card bill.

Stephen, like all deacons, dedicated his life to serving others. For Stephen, serving others was an act of love, but love always comes at great risk. The Nativity story is full of risk: Mary risked her own life for the love of God and for the love of her child; the Magi risked their lives by travelling to a foreign land to show their love to an unknown child; Joseph risked his and Mary’s life by fleeing to Egypt to save the life of their newborn. In the Hanukah story, the Maccabeans risked their lives for the love of God. Good King Wenceslas risked the cold to see that a poor man was warm and well fed. Risk is all around us this time of year. I think the publicity surrounding this flu season has made us all more aware of the great risk we take when we serve others. While we may (and should) do everything in our power to reduce our risk of getting sick or spreading disease to others, healthcare workers still take a risk every time they come to work to care for others that are suffering. This is nothing new. The Church has a long list of saints who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives for the sake of serving those in need. Whether or not we consciously think about it, every act of love is an act of risk taking, even (as the Christian story goes) for God.

Serving others may not always be comfortable and pleasant. It can at times (as the story of St. Stephen reminds us) have horrible consequences. It may mean holding the hands of those whom the world has abandoned. It may mean risking our own lives for the sake of the lives of others. It may mean literally or figuratively stepping out into the cold world to bring warmth to others. The beauty of many of our religious traditions are that they help us take that risk together. Like the young page following King Wenceslas, if we follow in the footsteps of the saints that have gone before us perhaps the world won’t be quite so cold.

We could, of course, try to play it safe. We could not take a chance on love; we could ignore the needs of others; we could just go our own way avoiding every risk, but what a bitterly cold world that would be indeed. Living in a world where our creator doesn’t risk loving us and where we don’t risk loving each other is, in my opinion, the only risk not worth taking.

Blessings,

Fr. Kevin

SpiritMatters Monthly November 2009

Poussez

The Montreal subway system came up with a clever solution for getting passengers in and out of their METRO stations in an efficient manner: rather than have the standard double doors in which people coming and going fend for themselves in opening their own doors, they created a very simple single door that pivots in the middle. If you push on the door to exit the station, you open the door for those entering. If you push on the door to enter the station, you also open the door for those exiting. I doubt that the designers of the METRO stations were trying to make a social statement, but they made one nonetheless: life doesn’t have to be about competition all the time. It is possible to get where you need to go without standing in the way of others.
Most of us were taught in school the principle of scarcity. What scarcity basically says is that we have unlimited needs and wants, but limited resources. In other words, we are taught that there is not enough to go around and therefore we must compete with each other just to get what we need. Much of human history seems to be about one group competing with another just to stay alive. There have been some moments of grace though when we have realized that life may not always have to be a case of “me or you.”

One of the great “American Stories” that I was taught growing up was that of how the Pilgrims left the religious persecution of the Old World and came to America to create a different type of society. One of the great pinnacle moments of that story is when the Pilgrims celebrated a great “Thanks-giving” feast after their Native American friends had helped them find and grow the food they needed to stay alive in this new land. The feast that the Pilgrims had with the Native Americans might have been seen as a hopeful sign that future relations between these two races would be characterized by charity and cooperation, but alas we know that was not the case. The old idea of scarcity crept back in and the Pilgrims soon found themselves competing with the Native Americans for the land, food, and resources that the abundant New World had to offer. Pretty soon the New World began to look just as bloody as the Old World. What happened? We turned survival from being about cooperation into being about competition.

The feast of Thanksgiving was a celebration of God’s abundance. When we realize that we have enough we have less inclination to take from others. Thanksgiving is a wonderful American tradition of taking a moment to remember how much we have, and how important that it is to share what we have with others. We are in danger of losing Thanksgiving though. Retailers have been in fierce competition with one another to see who can get the earliest jump on the holiday season. This year Christmas (or the retail version of it) invaded mid-October, perhaps September will be next. Retailers see Thanksgiving as a day to rest and energize for the shopping to follow the next day, not a day to recognize that we already have all we need.

I thank God for those moments of grace like that first Thanksgiving, when we realize that if we share what we have with those around us that we will get so much more in return than we would if we just tried to take what we want. Maybe we have enough. Maybe things are not as scarce as we are sometimes led to believe. Maybe life would be better if (like on the Montreal METRO) we worked together to push the doors out of the way, and not each other.

SpiritMatters Monthly October 2009

The term “monger” is a wonderful word that has largely fallen out of regular use in modern American English. It means “one who peddles or sells something.” The words “fishmonger” or “cheesemonger” may be somewhat familiar as they are used occasionally to refer to someone who either sells fish or cheese. Then there are terms like “warmonger” which is someone who sells the idea of war. What all mongers have in common is that they have something to sell. Mongers do not exist for the good of society, they exist to profit from selling their goods. This is not always a bad thing, as in the case of fishmongers and cheesemongers and others who sell us the necessities of daily life, but even with such tangible items there has always been the warning of “buyer beware.” Things are not always as they seem. In the middle ages, mongers or peddlers were generally regarded with a great deal of suspicion because they were known to mask the defects in their products in order to make them sell. Even to this day salespeople do not have the best reputation for being trustworthy, but of all the mongers out there selling questionable goods the most prevalent by far these days seems to be the fear monger.

Fear mongering is a very lucrative profession, since it takes very little investment of one’s own resources in order to profit from the fears of others. Fear mongers, like all other mongers, are in business for profit. But unlike other mongers, fear mongers profit by making things look worse than they really are. Preachers and politicians have long had the reputation of selling fear, but they certainly aren’t the only ones. Do this and all your worst fears will come true, or don’t do this and all your worst fears will come true; either way the fear monger uses fear to get what he or she wants. We have had a heavy dose of fear mongering in our country lately; some of it has been around the issue of healthcare reform; some of it has been around the issue of racism. The dynamics are much the same: convince people that they should be afraid of something or someone and you can get them to do almost anything. People who use fear to get what they want live in a perpetual Halloween: always trying to make things that aren’t all that scary, look terrifying.

What separates Halloween revelry from fear mongering though, is that we know Halloween is a joke. Fear mongers would have us believe that the creatures in our homes and streets on October the 31st are actually ghouls and goblins; they would have us see the mask and not the child beneath it. Fear mongers are there to sell us the idea that the boogey man is real and lurking around the corner. These peddlers of paranoia want us to believe that they are the only ones who can keep us safe and therefore we should entrust all our faith (not to mention our resources) to them.

The simplest way to fight fear mongers is to remember that they, like all mongers, are there to sell us something. They operate on the same principle of supply and demand as any other vendor. How do you put someone out of business? Don’t buy their goods. Ideas, like any other product, deserve a good inspection before they are purchased outright. Check to see if this fear is a legitimate concern, or just a mask on an innocent child. Invest your faith and your resources in something greater than fear and hope that maybe, just maybe, if we stop buying fear then the mongers will stop selling it.

Blessings,

Fr. Kevin+

SpiritMatters Monthly September 2009

Ba De Ya - Dancing in September...

September has never been my favorite month. As a child September always meant an end to summer vacation and a return to school work. Growing up in Florida, the most exciting thing about this time of the year was that it was the height of hurricane season, and that at least, offered the potential for some excitement. Perhaps it is no coincidence that September begins with Labor Day, because this month more than any other, seems to be about work. On Labor Day, we celebrate people who work. Students begin their fall courses working towards getting their diplomas or degrees, so that they may eventually get a job and work in their chosen field. Others return from their summer vacations, prepared to work through another fall, winter and spring.

September falls in the middle of what the Church calls “ordinary time,” which is to say that it is not one of the special seasons like Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent or Easter. Ordinary time is, well, ordinary. Most of our lives are spent in ordinary time, just as most of our lives are spent doing work, so unless we want our lives to be boring and our work to be drudgery, then we had best learn how to make the routine and daily necessities of our existence meaningful.

One of the most popular movies of this summer has been the film “Julie and Julia,” about two women whose lives are enriched and made more meaningful by the most mundane daily activity: cooking. At a time when the media was trying to convince people that cooking was a chore to be avoided, Julia Child entered the scene to show how much pleasure could be had in this necessary daily activity. What for so many people had been just meaningless work, became for Julia a life-giving vocation, and through her a vocation for many others.

How do you view the ordinary time in your life? Is it about dull, meaningless work or is it about a life-giving vocation? What Julia taught so many is that finding joy in everyday activities is less about what you do, and more about how you do it. Life is meant to be meaningful everyday, not just on special occasions.

For many people Labor Day will be a day of barbecues and parties and outings to celebrate a long weekend and the symbolic end of summer, but may we also remember that this holiday was founded to celebrate people who work and the work that they do. September might not be as exciting as some of the other months of the year, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful; perhaps being a bit more routine should make September more meaningful than other months. After all, which relationships generally mean more to us: the ones that come and go in a flash or the ones that are there day in and day out? May we see the ordinary times in our lives not as dull and boring, but as life-giving. And may our work be like our food: a necessity that gives us strength and pleasure at the same time.

Bon Appétit,

Fr. Kevin +

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?