Divine Mercy Sunday is a recent gift.  St. Faustina Kowalska (canonized in 2000) promoted devotion to the mercy of God, inspiring Pope John Paul II to set the Second Sunday of Easter apart as a worldwide day of mercy.  And of course no Gospel story is more filled with mercy than that of Jesus inviting a broken-hearted Thomas to touch his wounds, so to be healed of his own great wound of grief.

Mercy probably looks different to each of us.  Two moments come to mind for me.  In the first, I’m presenting my high school report card to my dad, and that D in Algebra just jumps off the page.  This will in fact be the last day of my life.  I brace.  And then, mercy.  He laughs, and love compels him to let me in on a secret I would otherwise never have known.

Listen, Kathy, that’s no big deal.  I got a D in Algebra too.

Did you feel that?  That was mercy.

The second is a story from my husband Ben’s miserable fourth grade school year in El Paso.  His collar bone broken in a fight with the school bully, he struggled to find a seat on the school bus.  When the prettiest and nicest girl in the fourth grade moved over and gave him the seat next to her she said to him, Guess who likes you? And he thought, I’m the loser new kid who just got hurt in a fight.  Nobody likes me. But this most darling, wonderful girl said, Me.  I like you.

And just as the Father sent her on to that school bus that day, so he sends you.

To whom will you extend mercy this week?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

It’s Easter.  Can you feel it?  It’s been silently making its way to us, through the chill and winds of March.  Birds who have suddenly found their way back to our back yard are greeting us with Easter song.  The single crocus in our front yard, planted by a young friend years ago who is now expecting her first baby, has faithfully pulled up out of the stone-cold ground.  Every spring it’s a delightful surprise.  You again!  We forgot all about you.  How sweet of you to keep popping up in our neglected yard, reminding us that Easter happens, ready or not.

How was your Lent?  Was your fast helpful in pulling you back from the things that are hurting you?  Are you more who you want to be, more determined to “not go back to that place of slavery” that keeps you dependent, or powerless?  That’s always my goal, and once again I didn’t achieve it.

But God brings Easter anyway, whether we had a successful Lent or not.  Our relentlessly loving God keeps sending flowers and rains, lilacs and lilies, baby chicks and baby humans.  An endless Lent is just not in God’s nature.  Easter is God’s nature, with its resurrections and Alleluias, its promise of new life, its memory of an empty tomb, and our Christ, whose triumph over the grave has opened the graves of all believers.

So once again I’ll shake off the ashes of failure, lift my face up to the sun, and hold my hands open wide.  It’s Easter, and the powers of hell cannot prevail against it.  Let the feast of the forgiven begin.

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Mark 14: 1-15:47

As I stand with the 1.4 billion Christians who will hear Mark’s Passion today I remember again why I love Jesus so much.  I love him because he healed, and forgave, and brought forth the kingdom of God.  But most of all I love Jesus  because there is no suffering that I will ever have that he hasn’t already suffered,  no betrayal or terror or agonizing death that he hasn’t also experienced.  I love him for that.

I have friends who have been lied to by their family members, cheated out of pensions by their employers, betrayed by their spouses.   Just after Jesus agonized in the Garden about the suffering that would soon overtake him, his beloved friend Judas brought a crowd carrying swords and torches into Gethsemane and said, “The one I kiss is the one.  Arrest him.” Jesus has redeemed this.

I’ve read of mothers who have watched their children die painfully.  I’ve seen my sweet husband stand, weeping, in front of the Pieta in St. Peter’s Basilica,  crying with Mary as she held her crucified Son in her arms.  Jesus has redeemed this.

Last week my brave friend Margie dealt with the unending pain of her chronic illness. My gentle friend Karen stood grieving at the grave of her father.  My gracious friends Eileen and Mike suffered through the terrors of Mike’s surgery to remove a brain tumor.  My brave friends Mary Ellen and Dorothy and Eric  faced another day with a terminal illness.  Jesus knows their pain, their fear, their suffering.  By his cross he has redeemed all of our terrors, our agonies, our sleepless, anxious nights.  He doesn’t know of them. He knows them.

Oh, Jesus.  We love you for that.

What particular part of Jesus’ Passion can you most understand?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 12:20-33

I’ve been thinking a lot about wheat lately.  I asked my friend Bob, a farmer and horticulturist, to talk to me about the mysteries of seeds and harvests.  In a conversation packed with fascinating insights connecting farming and faith he said, “The farmer knows what to expect in the future, because he (or she) has seen what God has done in the past.”

My friend Kathy offered this beautiful reflection on seeds, based on her years of teaching.  She said, “I’ve seen so many resurrections happen with my students through the years, and they’re never visible all at once.  The child who comes into your class in the fall is silently transformed through the months of the school year into the more confident and accomplished child who leaves your class in the spring.  Resurrections are silent things, sacred events begun in the dark earth and not visible to us until the green shoot rises out of the earth.”

Ah, beautiful.  No wonder Jesus used a farming image to explain what his death was about to accomplish.  When the Greeks coming for Passover—the premier agrarian festival!—asked to see him, Jesus took that opportunity to speak about the eternal life that was about to come from his death.

Unless a grain of wheat shall fall upon the ground and die it remains but a single grain with no life.

Like the husk of grain, we cling to this life because it’s all we know.  But there is a secret seed inside us, a soul that has been plotting resurrection quietly throughout our lives.  Jesus knew it, and promised it, even as the Cross beckoned.

What things have had to die in order for you to live more fully?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 3: 14-21

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

A little background on this strange passage might help.  Way back in the time of the Israelite sojourn in the desert, the Hebrews suffered all the trials of desert life.  They were hungry and thirsty, and the daily manna was so monotonous that they cried out to God, saying We detest this miserable food! God then added to their misery by “sending” snakes to bite them!  Yikes.

They repented of their rebelliousness and asked God to forgive them and take the snakes away.  And here’s what’s fascinating: God’s cure for the “snake-bit Hebrews” was for Moses to mount a bronze serpent on a pole and have them gaze on it.  And those who had been bitten were cured (Numbers 21:4-9).  Wow.

We’re right in the middle of Lent now, and the struggle with our own hungers and thirsts is in full gear.  Might we take inspiration from Moses, and look straight into the heart of that which has wounded us so badly in our lives?  Can we ask for the grace to gaze on the piercings of our pasts? The jobs we’ve lost, the deaths we’ve grieved, the gifts we’ve squandered, the children who’ve struggled with addictions and loss of faith—Jesus asks us to look on them, and then look on Him, raised up on the cross.  Here, oh Israel, is your true healer.  Gaze on him.  Trust that he can take you the rest of the way, through this Lent and every wilderness ahead.

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 2:13-25

The Temple (Rembrandt)

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Ain’t that the truth?  How many times have we understood our lives only after the passing of years?  If only we had had the wisdom and poise we now possess way back when we really needed it, like at that high school dance, or when we were raising our kids, or caring for failing parents.

Today’s Gospel is a good example of this vexing reality.  When Jesus is asked on what authority he takes a whip to the moneychangers and the animals in the Temple, he says Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.

No one understands.  What could Jesus possibly mean?  Everyone knew the Temple had been under reconstruction for 46 years already (and in fact was not completed until 62 AD, only to be destroyed by the Romans eight years later.)  So what could Jesus mean?

Ah.  Perhaps the light dawned as Peter and the Beloved Disciple and Mary Magdalene stood in the empty tomb that Easter morning and counted backwards.  Three days in the tomb.  In three days I shall raise the Temple up. Ah.  Jesus was the new Temple.  And he had to die in order to raise it up.

The Gospel says that after the resurrection Jesus’ disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.

Even the disciples had to “understand backwards”.  That which was hidden in life became astonishingly clear through death. And after that, no threat of martyrdom could keep them from carrying the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

What event in your life can you now understand more clearly than when it happened?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Genesis 22, 1-2,9a, 10-13,15-18

I wonder how many listeners of this terrifying story of the sacrifice of Isaac will say today, “I’d choose hell rather than slay my child in order to ‘do God’s will.’”

And those schizophrenic people who have killed their children because they “heard God’s voice” are now confined in mental institutions.

We search for a loving God here, and, truth be told, a loving Abraham too.  Because if we were Isaac, about to be strapped on the altar of sacrifice because our father was “obedient”, I think we’d say Who wants a father like that?

Of course, the story was written to address the horrific practice of child sacrifice in ancient Canaan, where the murder of male children was common in order to appease the indifferent gods of harvest.  The biblical story says to the minority Hebrews, “See? God never desires the murder of children.”

Second, it was easy for the earliest Christians to see Isaac as a “type” of Jesus himself, carrying the wood of the sacrifice (the Cross) up Mt. Moriah (later identified as Jerusalem).  God tells Abraham that God alone will provide the sacrifice, and we see in this story a prefigure of Jesus, the Lamb of God.

Finally, this ancient story can touch us as we offer back to God what we have cherished and lost in our lives−−our parents, our loves, our health.  God asks, Can you trust me to restore them all to you?  Can you “reason that (I) am able to raise even from the dead” (Heb. 11:17)?

Easter awaits.

What loves have you entrusted to God?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on I Peter 3:18-22

Here’s a question:  When exactly did the gates of heaven open? Was it at the moment of the crucifixion (see Mt. 27: 52-53)? And where exactly did the spirit of Jesus go when his body lay in the “abode of death?”

The second reading today (I Peter 3: 18-22) suggests a tantalizing answer: In (the Spirit) he also went to preach to the spirits in prison, who had once been disobedient while God patiently waited in the days of Noah…

This enigmatic sentence became a scriptural basis for the section in the Apostles’ Creed that states “He descended into hell”.

We used to say that every Sunday, but what does it mean?  I love this portion of an ancient poem by an unknown Christian, speaking about this mystery:

The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.  He has gone to search for our first parents, gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve.  He took them by the hand and raised them up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”.

How does time and space work with God?  Had “all who had ever slept since the world began” waited out those thousands of years in “real time”?  Or is there perhaps a “wrinkle in time”, a mere blink that separates this life (and death) from eternity?

Be at peace.  The God of heaven and earth (and under the earth) has gone in search of us.

Is it hard to imagine that hell might be empty?

With thanks to my dear friend Susan Maly, who lent me A Wrinkle in Time and set me on a whole new path of understanding all the things we’ll never understand.

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Mark 2:1-2

My friends Mary and Jim had been high school sweethearts, and they had kept their romance going through college while on opposite sides of the country.  But for a short time during the spring of their sophomore year they were a mere ninety miles away from each other.  And one night James Taylor showed up unexpectedly to give an impromptu concert to hundreds of astonished students in a little field on the Denver University campus.

That’s when the agony started, because Jim was right there and Mary was at college in Fort Collins. Jim had a front-row stump (there were no chairs in the field) watching James Taylor sing all the songs that he and Mary loved, and he spent the whole time longing for Mary to be there to share the experience with him.  That’s the thing about love.

I think about that as I relish the love that those four friends had for the paralytic in today’s Gospel.  Whatever it took, even carrying him across town and dropping him down through the roof, they were going to get their sick friend into the presence of Jesus.  The Healer was there, and they couldn’t be happy until their friend was touched by him. That’s the thing about love.

At some point in our lives, someone brought us to Jesus.  Perhaps it was our parents, who brought us to the doors of the church for baptism.  Perhaps it was a friend, who said “Come and see.”   Thanks be to God for their kindness, for now we too can say, “Oh, Jesus.  How sweet it is to be loved by you.”

Who are the friends in your life who would carry you across town to meet Jesus?

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Mark 1: 40-45

The leper, kneeling before Jesus, wonders if he wants to heal him.  If you wish, you can make me clean, he says.  But maybe you don’t wish it.  Maybe you’re a God with wonderful healing powers to relieve us of our suffering, our blindness, our lameness, our demon possession, but maybe you just don’t want to.  So you have to be coaxed and flattered and manipulated by those of us who are sick.

I admit I’ve approached God similarly.  Now listen, God, this is a little child we’re talking about here.  She’s suffering. You love little children, remember? You have the power to heal her.  If you want to you can heal her, God.  I know you can do it.  Let my words convince you to be merciful.

We think we have to sweet-talk God into being compassionate because, in spite of our prayers, our coaxing, our crying out to God, eventually we and the ones we love still die. God, if you want to you can save us from death! And if death comes anyway we conclude that God just doesn’t want to.

But I find great comfort in the translation in the 1966 Jerusalem Bible.  When the leper says to Jesus, if you want to you can make me clean, Jesus says of course I want to!

Of course I want to. That’s all we need to know.  Jesus our Healer wants to heal us.  Why we still suffer and die is a mystery that remains.  But death’s victory is short-lived, for the God who loves us knows where to find us after we have breathed our last.  And oh, what healing will begin then.

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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).