The path to true peace, joy, and freedom — which is to say the path to union with God — isn’t often the same as the path to comfort. The first path I mentioned will require setting off without knowing what the journey will involve or what the destination will be like. In other words, following the path to union with God will ask us to trust what lies beyond our wounds, fears, and desires.
The journey will remind us that listening only to our instinct for self-preservation has led us astray in the past. It has isolated us, keeping us from finding true peace, joy, and freedom together, which is the only way we can find these gifts. We can’t find them alone.
We’re relational creatures who find our deepest sense of meaning beyond ourselves and our experiences, even beyond the communities we build with each other. We find lasting peace, joy, and true freedom when we recognize that while it’s essential to acknowledge our experiences and communities, as well as our practical needs, there is Someone who promises to provide for all of our needs and more, and we’re able to live in this reality.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
“That feeling of holy discontent doesn’t mean that yesterday’s prayer didn’t work; it means that God is building a relationship of trust with you. Just like the Israelites’ physical hunger kept them looking to the heavens for manna, our spiritual hunger turns us toward God.”
Lord, help me not to confuse comfort with true peace, joy, and freedom. Give me the faith and courage to trust you and to follow You when doing so feels most difficult so that I can find true peace, joy, and freedom. Amen.
This week’s readings are about being in exile — far from home, the place where one belongs. The first reading and the psalm teach that God can work, even through those in exile — perhaps especially through the exiled, provided that those in exile don’t lose sight of who they are and where they come from. God works through those in exile precisely because while they hopefully can live in harmony with the people native to the place they now find themselves, they stand out. They can use their visibility to be examples of authenticity and charity. Humility is necessary for authenticity, and authenticity makes room for charity, which is service toward and cooperation with others.
The third reading teaches that we can be neither authentic nor humble if we’re under the illusion that anything we are or anything we do comes from us alone. Setting aside any environmental factors that contribute to who each of us is, none of us would exist without the combined DNA of other people, and none of the people who make up who we are would exist without God’s life giving, sustaining, and restoring love. All that is exists to magnify and to be a channel for that love.
Unfortunately, the magnifying glass or prism that each of us is meant to be gets clouded by things we get tricked into thinking are God. These idols block our ability to see God’s light, to feel its warmth, through and beyond them. Blockers of God’s light that come to my mind are fear, shame, anger, and envy.
This week’s Gospel reading reassures us that Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn us for the very human experiences that I just listed. He came into the world to bear the weight of all our sins, our weaknesses and our pain, to surrender himself entirely to these, going so far as to engage with death itself so that He could neutralize its power and along with it, the power of every other human frailty. The key to experiencing that, as evidenced by His victory over death, He’s stronger than every idol is to hand over the imposters to His custody so they don’t take custody of us. This handing over is so much harder to do than the writing about it was. The imposters still feel powerful, no matter how many times we hear that God has rescued us from them. We let ourselves get trapped by them into believing we should hide from the light because we belong to the seemingly stronger darkness, and that we’ll be set adrift and alone if we come into the light’s embrace and expose the distortions darkness creates as the illusions they are.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
It’s one thing to write about not hiding from the light and instead moving forward into its healing rays. It’s another matter to take the risk of coming out of hiding and to trust. One step toward allowing God to embrace me in my weakness and with all the I’m ashamed of is to bring what I’m tempted to hide to God in prayer. Doing this feels like coming to God and asking God to put a spotlight on me. In this situation, I may confront what I’d rather hide, even from myself. But I’ve also been known in times like this to be confused about what God wants me to bring to light. These tendencies are the reason why I need at least one other person to help me lift to God what I’d rather not acknowledge. The first three readings support my need for healing to have a relational component I can perceive with my physical senses.
And yet it’s so hard to seek this help, to put into words what fear warns me keep silent. After all, everyone else is imperfect too, and no one has the unlimited perspective of God. Will my frailty, my failings be understood if I share them? Will they be judged? Can I even put them into words? Will doing so ever bring me closer to spiritual wellness? After years of struggling in the same ways, believing I can be spiritually free and comfortable in the light is so difficult.
Nonetheless, “I do believe,” Lord, [H]elp my unbelief. (Mark 9-24). Help me not to carry burdens you are waiting to take from me. Grant me the grace to seek and to find refuge in Your light along with and in the sight of all your children. Amen.
Work cited
The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
The first reading reminds me I’m not alone when life feels like a burden and everything life involves feels like nothing more than an ending and unwelcome obligation. It reminds me it’s okay to share these feelings with God in an unfiltered way. It also encourages me to consider the ways the situations I find myself in might be different than the trials Job finds himself in the midst of. It reminds me to look for blessings, however insignificant they sometimes seem.
This week’s psalm is one of praise. It characterizes God as a healer of all kinds of wounds, a healer whose wisdom has no limits.
The third reading returns to the subject of obligations, specifically the obligation to preach the gospel. When I read the parts of 1 Corinthians that come before and after this reading, I’m reminded that preaching the gospel is about so much more than talk. It’s about living like Jesus so that his message will come alive for others through me. Living like Jesus means giving of myself to others, acknowledging my feelings and desires and what I’m experiencing in a given moment, without forgetting that these realities are for from permanent.
Therefore, I have the obligation to preach the gospel with my life regardless of how I feel about having that mission. If I’m eager to fulfill that mission, the fulfilling of it is its own reward. If I’m not eager, then I’ve been asked to share the gifts that God has given to me anyway. I’m also challenged when I share these gifts not to expect to receive anything from the person with whom I’m sharing. The promise of the reading, perhaps, is that the reward whenever I offer nothing beyond my obedience will be grace received from giving without expectations. Such giving promises the grace of spiritual freedom. It seems to me that this freedom paradoxically offers the ability to reach out to people from many different walks of life because a spiritually free person isn’t preoccupied with the concerns of only one individual or group. A person can get a more expansive perspective from this situation because she hasn’t zoomed in on the picture too closely.
In the fourth reading, I see Jesus living what this paradox of spiritual freedom looks like. Peter’s mother-in-law is ill, and Peter brings this situation to Jesus, who cares for His friend by making the mother-in-law well. Yet Jesus doesn’t just help His closest companions or the people in one town. We read about Him moving on to the next town. But before He does so, He makes time for rest, quiet, prayer, and reflection, showing that these activities are essential to fulfilling His mission, which is a mission you and I have been asked to share with others and with Him.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz’s reflection on this week’s reading calls attention to what Jesus does when He heals Peter’s mother-in-law. I find it inspiring that she zeros in on the very human detail that she does. Read here to find out what I mean. Her reflection also includes a quotation I’ll turn into a pull quote that makes a good summary of this week’s readings, as well as a words to bring to prayer.
Discovering wholeness, healing, and joy do not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we are healed and discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.
From The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, as quoted by Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz
Beyond this week’s readings:
I’m not writing this post as a person who practices what this week’s readings preach. My natural inclination right now and at almost all other times, it seems, is to crawl in a hole in the ground with a device whose battery somehow never dies and lose myself in games, music, and movies. Forever. Because silence and reality feel too heavy to bear.
Now movies, games, aren’t necessarily bad things. In fact, I believe they can be part of rest. It’s the desire to turn only to these things that’s problematic, to say the least. My experience is that these activities don’t provide rest that’s truly restorative. Maybe an activity’s ability to restore makes the difference between its ability to provide escape and its ability to provide rest. The things that are easy for me to turn to offer escape, while prayer and reflection provide rest.
Can listening to music to be a form of prayer? Absolutely. But my experience is that even music or a movie with a spiritual message sometimes offers the illusion of a preferable change in feelings or perspective, an illusion that fades once the music or the picture fades.
I guess this experience is a reminder that so much of life is fleeting, and that the only constants are God and change and that God is the source of true rest. And yet God isn’t calling me to rest all the time — even in God. The time for eternal rest comes after this life. While I still have this life, God calls me to a varying rhythm of work and rest.
Lord, help me to resist the constant desire to withdraw and to stay withdrawn. Help me to reach out to others rather than lash out at them. Amen.
Work Consulted but Not Linked to
The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
This week’s readings say to me that the room within me created for faith by humility and perseverance is not a comfortable space. It’s a space the Holy Spirit fills with its fire, and fire burns, and this fire cannot be contained. So it doesn’t let people who carry it be still in the place where they were before the fire sparked. People within whom it burns cannot help but move as it moves. They can’t help but spread it because their movement feeds it, and they give it room to spread. Spreading it means the next person who makes room for and fuels the fire can’t stay where he or she is either. As we witness this these effects of the spread, our inclinations toward convenience and self-preservation tell us to stop it. We don’t want to move. We don’t want to change. We don’t want to be different from earlier versions of ourselves or from the people around us. And we can’t stop these processes. We can increase our discomfort with the Spirit’s transformative power by resisting it, or we can find a peace that comes from freedom by accepting and participating in its transformative power.
The Good News is this transformative power. Its burning isn’t one that destroys but one that gives life. That life just won’t look the way our desires for convenience and self-preservation want it to because it changes us from the inside out and changes our relationship with our surroundings, including how we think about them, see them, and interact them. This change won’t let a person blend in, and the reading from Romans encourages us to ask for the grace not to want to blend in — at least not just for the sake of blending in. Any blending a person might do must be done for the Spirit. And any work done for the Spirit can only be done in cooperation with the movement of the Spirit.
The Gospel tells us not even to let fear for our lives get in the way of the movement of the Spirit. It says caving to such fear won’t save us, even though we may feel as if listening to fear will save us.
I used to think of this reading as being only about the importance of living faith and sharing it regardless of any risks that living it and sharing it might pose to my life. Of course, this is the literal message of the reading. However, I’ve come to want to apply it more broadly to life’s difficult situations. I wonder if my broader understanding will relate to someone else’s reflection on these readings. Let’s find out in the next two sections.
What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:
God called Phoebe and Gregory to bring the Gospel to others in word and action. We are called to do the same, though not always by using the texts and trappings of our faith.
There are people all over the world for whom living their faith costs them their freedom and even their earthly lives. I hope none of us seeing these words ever have to pay those prices.
But even if we never have to, each of us dies and finds life regularly, but if we don’t surrender to these smaller deaths, we miss opportunities to find life.
For me, as a person with anxiety and cerebral palsy, one of these smaller deaths can mean doing things my mind says are not safe to do, such as:
Joining a group with whom I might share an interest or a goal when I don’t know any of the members or when I don’t know how accessible the place where then be is going to be
Having the courage to be who I am and share my perspective when I don’t fit totally into one camp or another in a world that’s divided and subdivided into camps.
Having the courage to get to know someone whose experience is different from my own and may make me uncomfortable and encourage me to ask myself questions about my own views.
Not avoiding situations that remind me of difficult ones I have faced in the past. Please understand that with this example, I’m not advocating that anyone stay in abusive situations. I’m saying that there’s a difference between an unpleasant or uncomfortable situation and an unhealthy or unsafe one. I’m also saying that anxiety likes to lie to me and tell me that these two types of situations are the same. They aren’t.
I’ve also come to believe that losing my life to save it encompasses surrendering control and ideas of what I want various situations and people to be like. I think this is such a difficult thing for all of us to do. I don’t know whether the difficulty of doing this increases depending on how great a sense of independence a person is used to having or if the desire and frustration are equally strong regardless of a person’s circumstances.
Either way, I can think of a few different ways to express the ironic truth in this week’s Gospel passage:
However tightly I cling to life on earth I cannot make it last forever.
Surrounding myself with different types of walls or with metaphorical bubblewrap might save my body, for a time, but these actions won’t save my soul. In fact, they might kill it. Furthermore, a withering soul withers the body, eventually – in one way or another. (I’m pretty sure too much isolation and too few contacts are unhealthy for the body and the soul. And eating one’s emotions, an attempt at treating the pain of the soul, I’d say, can kill the body if it isn’t moderated.)
Staying alive is not the same as living; surviving is not the same as thriving.
Lord, help me neither to fear my death to earthly life, nor the precursors to this death that I face each day so that I can live in the freedom of the life you have planned for me. Amen.
Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
Matthew 1:19-20
This isn’t the post I was working on last week before I realized it needed more time. I’ll come back to that one when the readings lend themselves to the ideas and experiences I was wrestling with. This week, I’d like to sit with Joseph, as the Gospel reading, Matthew 1-18-24 invites me to.
Joseph is caught in the middle of what must have seemed like a huge no-win situation. The woman he intends to take into his home as his wife is carrying a child, and he isn’t the father of that child. I imagine Joseph thinking he should divorce Mary because all the evidence—except for I imagine what she’s told him about the visit from the angel — says she’s been unfaithful to the covenant made between him and her father. If the usual explanation for Mary’s condition is the truth and not the explanation she has given, the Law says Joseph has a right — and is probably expected — to divorce her.
But we’re told Joseph is a righteous man. Given this information, I like to think that his internal comes not only from not wanting to expose Mary to a public disgrace that might result in her being stoned. I’d like to think that deep down, he’d rather not divorce her quietly. Really, he’d rather not divorce her at all. I imagine him having had such high hopes for the future of his marriage and family. I imagine he cherished Mary’s deep love for God, her family, her friends, and her village. I imagine him having trouble believing Mary would betray that love and fearing that Mary’s pregnancy has come about as a result of violence on the part of an occupying soldier. (I don’t think I’m the first writer to put these thoughts in Joseph’s head. I think the movie The Nativity Story depicts him asking Mary if a Roman soldier is the father of her child, but I could be thinking of a different adaptation.) I imagine him thinking that if Mary is a survivor of such violence, who knows how the trauma has changed her. No wonder she’s not making sense. Maybe her mind is telling her this story about a visit from an angel because she blocked out what really happened. If this is the case, he wants to offer her and her child the shelter of his good name and his home even more than he did before he found out she was pregnant.
This train of thought leads Joseph back to the reality that people will talk. No matter how he handles the situation, people will talk. The life of a workman striving to nurture and to support a godly family was always going to be challenging. No matter what choice he makes, he now knows that his life will be exponentially more challenging than he thought it would. This situation is an invitation to be more concerned with living righteously than with worrying about offending the sensibilities of influential people.
These are all thoughts I imagine cycling through Joseph’s mind before the angel enters his dream. And then what does the angel have to say to him? “Do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home” (Matt. 1: 20). I’ll continue by paraphrasing Mathew 1:20-24: “Mary hasn’t broken any covenant. The child she carries was conceived by the Spirit of God and is the Son of God, God with Creation.”
The angel’s message lays to rest Joseph’s doubts and calms his fears about what has happened to Mary. In other words, he has received consolation regarding troubling developments in his own life. He has also been chosen as one of the first to witnesses to the fulfillment God’s promise to send a Messiah.
Nonetheless, the angel’s message doesn’t promise that Joseph’s life will be any easier, thanks to his role in salvation history. He had to have wondered how he could teach the Son of God how to be a righteous man. He had to have wondered who would be the student and who would be the teacher, and I wonder if, on some level, he knew the answer was that he and Jesus would be both to each other. He had to wonder how people would accept a Messiah who had been brought up by a humble workman. I’m imagining Joseph wondering whether God would expect him to change how he supported his family so that the Messiah would be better prepared to lead his people.
The answer to this question seems to have been “No.” God is going to work through and to grow up with the help on the man who Joseph is. This process isn’t going to be smooth. The world that Jesus comes into — our world — is very broken by sin. And yet, God loves each of us as much as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.
In reflecting on this reading, I’m reminded that in becoming human, God didn’t end suffering. He entered into it and took it upon Himself so that it wouldn’t have the last word. Perfect love will. It’s a Love that doesn’t forget anyone. It holds close those who are afraid, ostracized, overlooked, ashamed, lonely, and vulnerable.
Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday July, 2 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.179, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 26 Feb. 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm
As a whole, the readings above offer a lot of hope. They tell me that people from every nation, regardless of their circumstances, are invited to enter God’s kingdom. They remind me that “[my] salvation is nearer now than when [I] first believed” (Rom 13:11, The New American Bible Revised Edition).
Yet even as these readings inspire me, I find them daunting. The first reading tells me that its promises won’t be fulfilled without me first fighting a battle that won’t just be an uphill one. It will be an “upmountain” one. Isaiah envisions the place where God dwells as being on the summit of a mountain because the Jewish people had a long history of meeting God on peaks. These settings seem fitting because Scripture reminds me that God’s ways are not my ways. They are high above [my] own (Isa. 55:8-9). In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he reminds me to “think about what is above” (3:2).
However, if I take the concept of “climb[ing] the Lord’s mountain” out of the context of the rest of the passage, the words carry connotations of a meeting with God being the result of an achievement on my part (Isa. 2:3, The New American Bible, 2001) It isn’t. Isaiah calls me to make the trip “that [God] may instruct [me] in his ways and [I] may walk in his paths (Isa. 2:3). I have a lot left to learn and to do. The learning and doing will mean letting go in order to transcend “what is on earth” (Col. 3:2). It will mean letting go of the weights of selfishness and self-centeredness. It will mean recognizing that whatever is not God or does not share God’s character is temporary and may act like a weight that holds down the balloon of my soul and keep it from ascending to God. The heavier the weight, the harder it is to get out from under. I can’t just shrug it off. Only Someone above me can lift it, and that Someone is God. But God often doesn’t pry out of my hands what I have a white-knuckle grip on. Instead God waits for me to release to Him the burdens of selfishness that I clutch to myself, though His cross would lift them from me if I let it.
Still, it feels like another kind of burden to lay the burden of selfishness on the cross because it can be hard to recognize selfishness for what it is. It can feel like a weighted blanket I hide under. To come out from under this blanket is to be at my most vulnerable, to be naked, to stand out rather than be camouflaged by the temporary trappings of day-to-day life.
I won’t have forever to act as the Divine reflection on earth that I was born to be — that each of us is born to be. My time on earth may well end when I least expect it to end, on a day that previously seemed as uneventful as the one before it. May I recognize opportunities to act selflessly, to build community, and to make peace while I have these opportunities. This is the prayer that the New Testament reading I cite at the beginning of this post inspires me to offer. Amen.
The Bible.The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday July, 2 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.179, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 26 Feb. 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm
I think the parable in Luke 16:1-13 might be the most perplexing one for me. The variety of interpretations this reflection offers suggests I’m far from the only one who’s not sure how to apply this story to my own life. Maybe it isn’t one interpretation or the other that’s valid. Maybe it’s a parable that’s meant to be understood differently in different circumstances.
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple . . . . In the same way, anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14: 26, 33
The message of Luke 14:26 sounds like one to which I’m inclined to respond, “Jesus, I don’t think you’re the one to follow after all. Hating someone, anyone, especially my parents seems like too much to ask of me and a bad idea. It doesn’t bring about good. And besides, it seems to break one of the Ten Commandments. As for Luke 14:33, I like my stuff a lot. Most of it, I’m never going to hate, so it would be disingenuous for me to pretend otherwise.”
Fortunately, to paraphrase my pastor, in using the word “hate,” Jesus is using dramatic, extreme language to get the attention of his audience and to make a point. In an effort to relate to this communication choice, I can’t help but think of a little kid saying after spending eight hours at an amusement park, “This is the best day ever!” When that person looks back on the trip as an adult, will he or she really recall that they as the best one ever? Maybe not. But the kid is making a point about the overwhelming enthusiasm he or she feels about the experiences of the day. Viewed in light of this analogy, Jesus’ point isn’t that we should hate anyone. It’s about how overwhelmingly he loves God and wants us to experience the same love. I think loving God means having an overwhelming love for doing good. It means, the pastor said, that we shouldn’t “let our possessions possess us.”
Accordingly, rather than thinking in terms of hating everything that isn’t God, I find it not necessarily easier but more attractive to think of the verses above in terms of not letting anything but God possesses me.
I find my phone useful, and I really like to play games on it, but I definitely don’t want to think of my phone possessing me, nor do I want to think of my parents or any other person owning me. I don’t want to own anyone either. I say, “This is my friend,” or “This is my sister. This is my niece.” to clarify how someone is connected to me, but I would be alarmed at someone treating another person in like an object he or she possesses. It would be wrong of me to try to control every move of someone I care about. To do so would be abuse.
To abuse anyone or anything won’t help me grow into the person God means me me to be. Instead, abusing anyone or anything will disfigure God’s image in me. It will draw me away from union with God because my energies will be devoted to hanging on as tightly as I can to the person or thing I’m abusing. My first and last thoughts each day may be about that person or thing. I won’t be free because of the tight grip that person or thing has on me, and I may not be able to appreciate and that person or thing as the gift that he, she, or it is. Instead, more than anything else that might matter to me I may fear losing what I abuse. I may want more and more of or from him, her, or it. The pursuit of him, her, or it may push aside whatever else matters to me. The pursuit will mean that I’m never at rest in God.
This isn’t the life God wants for me—or you. God created us to be free, even when it comes to our relationship with the Divine. It’s up to us to invite God into our lives, to ask God to fill us. God doesn’t take us by force.
Lord, help us recognize your presence and to invite you into our choices, so we can love as you love—in freedom and without the possessiveness that comes from fear. Amen
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Sitting with the Sacred 