A Homily to get me in trouble

In some ways I am glad that I will not be preaching in the US this weekend. 

The first reading, Exodus 11: 20-26, is so strong that I fear that some people would walk out – if they took it seriously. 

“You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.” 

From what I can see from a distance, this passage is an indictment of current US policy toward the migrant and the poor. (Note: when the scriptures speak of “the widow and the orphan” they are referring to those who are without support and who therefore are poor and marginalized.) 

Combine this passage with paragraph 39 of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti, and we’ve got a real problem. 

Then too, “in some host countries, migration causes fear and alarm, often fomented and exploited for political purposes. This can lead to a xenophobic mentality, as people close in on themselves, and it needs to be addressed decisively”. Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. Hence, they ought to be “agents in their own redemption”. No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human. For Christians, this way of thinking and acting is unacceptable, since it sets certain political preferences above deep convictions of our faith: the inalienable dignity of each human person regardless of origin, race or religion, and the supreme law of fraternal love.

Scapegoating migrants, treating them as less than human, characterizing their homelands as “shit-hole countries,” speaking about immigrants fleeing violence and poverty as an invasion, calling them animals, speaking of a political opponent as having a “plan to inundate your state with a historic flood of refugees,” seriously restricting the number of refugee admissions – neither Isaiah nor Pope Francis would tolerate these actions.  

These are appeals to our worse nature, to our fears, to our sinful selfishness. They are not the ways of God or of followers of Christ. 

I speak from Honduras. Hundreds of thousands have fled from here for many years – seeking refuge from the violence, seeking a way out of poverty (as my Irish ancestors did in the 1840s), fleeing a government (financially supported by the US) rife with corruption and probable connections to drug trafficking. 

I know some from our parish, some from the village where I live who have left and are living decent lives in the US, trying to support their families. They are real people whose names I know. 

But I am not just concerned about them. I am concerned about people in the US who support these xenophobic policies. 

What has become of their souls? What sort of fear has overcome them and silenced their better part? What sense of isolation has led them to look down on others? What spiritual pandemic has infected them? 

I grieve for them. I pray that they may find a wholeness of spirit to welcome the stranger. I pray that whatever has led them to this will be purged from the US culture. 

And I have a dream that migrants and the opponents of migrants may sit down at table, share their joys and hopes, their fears and anxieties, so that God can heal the US of the anger and fear, the anxiety and uncertainties and make of them a people who can be healed by the power of a loving God who loves all, especially those who are or feel themselves marginalized. 

May God heal us all.

Ruminating on Isaiah 65

Today’s first reading, Isaiah 65: 17-21, is a challenge.

“I create Jerusalem to be a joy.”

How can we react to such a joyful message – stuck at home, insecurity in terms of the health situation in the country, and reading Albert Camus’s The Plague?

“No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying…”

God, you’ve got to be mocking us? Though there are few cases of corona virus 19 here in Honduras, we’re confined to our houses. Some towns are letting people out for 3 hours – but from where I am it’s not really possible to get to Dulce Nombre (and they are saying that they’ll confiscate vehicles.)

But there are people who have little or no food – who are hungry. How get food for them?

Is this just a taste of what the people in the time of Isaiah were experiencing in exile? How can he say such words of hope?

“They shall live in the houses they build, and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.”

But my neighbor is working on his house. And two guys are working on the local church meeting hall. I am concerned that they are putting themselves at risk. But…

Yesterday I was rather upset that more than twenty people were in the local church. Though they had cancelled the Celebration of the Word, people were gathered – without much sense of a distance between them. And the mayor was not far away from where they were gathering. When I shared my concern, someone said that was fear. No, I insisted.

I may be wrong but the idea of a social distancing has little sense for the culture here.

In the meantime, I keep a distance – wash clothes and dishes, do some reading and writing, pray, and whatever. I also am keeping myself ready if I am called for anything.

But Isaiah shares these words of the Lord:

“I am about to create new heav­ens and a new earth…”

Will we let God create of us a new heaven and a new earth?

Will our social isolation open us to a new vision or will we return to the same old social isolation that is part of an individualistic culture?

Will we learn anything from this? Will be learn to be a people? Will we learn that we are in this together? This is not a way to make the concern less, as it seems to be for Cottard in The Plague. This may be a way to help us learn that we belong and thus stay in the struggle as Rambert does. Though he has a chance to escape in a few hours, he decides to stay and shares these thoughts with Dr. Rieux:

“Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.’

Make of us, Lord, a people who truly share in the joys and sorrows of others.

Providentially, today’s New Testament reading for Vigils in Benedictine Daily Prayer is 2 Corinthians 1:1-7, one of my favorite passages from Saint Paul, especially verse 7:

“Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, so too also you share in our consolation.”

Have hope.

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- Albert Camus, The Plague, pp. 209-210. (Vintage International)

- Photo of Jerusalem from the church Dominus Flevit - The Lord Wept.

- Print of Kathe Kollwitz from a museum in Köln, Germany 

Advent: disarmament and waking from the dream of separateness

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13: 11-14

Notes in English for a homily I will share tonight at the Vigil Mass of the First Sunday of Advent in Dolores, Copán, Honduras, inspired by Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, in a year filled with death.

This year the municipality of Honduras has experienced at least six violent deaths: the killing of the mayor, the woman and her two children killed in a murder by arson in San Antonio Dolores, the couple who were killed by machetes in their home in Pasquingual.

It has not been a year of peace, but the prophet Isaiah gives us a vision of peace - on the Lord's mountain: 

“they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks… they shall not train again for war.”

How far is this vision from our reality? But what shall we do?

In the poor neighborhood of Philadelphia, where Shane Clairborne lives with a Christian community, they witnessed the killing of a nineteen year old in the block where Shane lives. Their response was inspired by this passage of Isaiah and they began a campaign to turn weapons into gardening tools, making shovels out of AK-47s. The movement has spread throughout the world.

This is an important first step in a world where weapons abound. This is a first step.

There is a need for nations to pound their weapons into instruments of peace, starting nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In fact, on October 27 this year, the United Nations voted to launch negotiations for a treaty abolishing nuclear weapons. Both France and the United States worked behind the scenes to oppose the move, and together with other nations including Great Britain, and Russia opposed it.

But what even a treaty is not enough.

As Dorothy Day wrote in the September 1938 Catholic Worker, we need “a disarmament of the heart”:

Today the whole world is in the midst of a revolution. We are living through it now – all of us. History will record this time as a time of world revolution. And frankly, we are calling for Saints…. We must prepare now for martyrdom — otherwise we will not be ready. Who of us if … attacked now would not react quickly and humanly against such attack? Would we love our brother [or sister] who strikes us? Of all at The Catholic Worker how many would not instinctively defend [themselves] with any forceful means in [their] power? We must prepare. We must prepare now. There must be a disarmament of the heart.

How can we do this?

I think St. Paul has much to teach us in this regard. Writing to the Romans, living in the heart of a violent and oppressive empire, he urged them to a heart-felt conversion:

Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ…

This is how we can begin disarmament.

But this disarmament, this conversion, takes place when we wake up. As Paul wrote, 

“it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.”

Perhaps the first step to wake up is what happened to Thomas Merton on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, where, as he put it in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he woke from a dream of separateness:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness….This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! …There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. There are no strangers! … If only we could see each other [as we really are] all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other….

When he begin to see the presence of God in others, when we realize that we are all one and responsible for each other, then we can begin the conversion, the disarmament of the heart that will open us to welcome the disarmed world that God promised to Isaiah and to us who worship the Prince of Peace.

Stirring the spark into flame

July 31 is the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.

I have been blest to have studied in two Jesuit universities (the University of Scranton for my undergraduate degree and Boston College for my doctorate). 

I have also been privileged to have met some good Jesuits, one of my favorites was Father Dean Brackley, S.J. After the 1989 martyrdom of the six Jesuits at the San Salvador University of Central America (UCA), he joined their faculty. He died in October 2011 of pancreatic cancer.

One of Dean’s books, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, has been extremely significant for my life, particularly helpful as I discerned whether God was rally calling me to Honduras. (I heartily recommend the book, now available in Spanish translation from the UCA.)

In this book Dean wrote:

“The spirituality we associate with [St. Ignatius] is all about tending the flame in us, as it is purified, flourishes, or even flags, and stirring the fire in others.”

In 2003 I went to Peru with a group sponsored by Maryknoll and the Catholic Campus Ministry Association. In Cusco we met with some university students and I sad a few words to them. After the meeting ended, I approached a group of students and one asked me, “You have such chispa. How do you keep it up?” (Chispa  is Spanish for “spark.”)

My immediate answer – without even thinking – was: My contact with students and my direct contact with the poor, especially in El Salvador. As I reflected later, I would have to add that I also need daily time for quiet prayer in the morning

About a year later I was experiencing some conflicts in my ministry. I had sought out a spiritual director and told her that I felt that the spark in me was growing faint. In many ways I was asking the Lord to breathe on it and make it burn more strongly.

This brought to mind for me a passage from Isaiah 42: 3:

“A bruised reed he will not crush, nor will he snuff out a smoldering wick.”

My spiritual director and a counselor helped God restore the spark in me.

Now in Honduras I feel that God is keeping this spark alive, stirring it into flame, as I work with the poor.

I also see that God is working through me to help stir the fire in others. The last few weeks I have seen some marvelous advances in the lives and ministries of so many people in the Dulce Nombre parish. God is truly stirring the sparks into flame and I’ve been privileged to be part of this process.