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Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy the variety of topics to enhance your spiritual life. You can read them below or download them and read at your leisure. I have also added my Sunday Homilies.
CURRENT TOPICS: Notes for Presentation on Mary + God Is Beautiful + Short History of the Eucharist in Five Questions + Outline of History of Eucharist.
ENJOY!
6th Sunday OT – Luke 6:17, 20-26
“Blessed are you…woe to you!”
In Catholic Women Preach, Sr. Bridget Bearss, religious of the Sacred Heart, writes,
“After my mother died, my father was lost. He had planned to go first. A diabetic, every night at 10 pm he and my mother shared a snack that helped regulate his blood sugar through the night. Every night at 10 pm, they broke bread—literally: they ate toast.
“I was with my father a couple of weeks after my mother died, and one night at 10 pm I said to him,
“I’ll go and make us some toast.”
He shook his head with definitive clarity, “No. No toast.”
Presuming this was to protect his open heart of grief, I said, “Because you ate toast with Mom every night?”
“No,” he said, “Because I hate toast.”
I was baffled and sat back down. “Wait. For sixty-six years, every night you ate toast and you don’t like toast?”
“That’s right,” he replied.
“Why didn’t you ever say something?” I asked.
“Because your mother loved toast. That’s why I ate toast.”
Sister Bridget continues, “That is what it means, for me, to dwell in the heart of God…To be so willing to step outside the ego, the self, that we are drawn into the heart of another. We are drawn into the heart of God. Sometimes we are the one who makes the toast for another and sometimes we are the one who eats it because that’s what love calls us to do. It is never one or the other—it is always both/and.
Then she compared this to our divided world, but more important, she states that we are the instruments of the heart of God who choose to build bridges of relationship in places, structures, attitudes, and experiences of difference. We do not remain in the polarity but live from the unity of knowing that we, each one of us, have the possibility to be a prophet or a persecutor.
In Luke’s gospel we have both blessings and curses. Luke pictures Jesus as the New Moses, who has spoken with God in prayer on a mountain and now descends to proclaim God’s ways to all who are ready to listen in the traditional language of blessing and curse to describe the kingdom of God.
But why these curses or woes? The rest of the gospel helps us understand. We read of the avarice of the rich fool who wanted to build “himself” bigger barns, or of the cruelty of the billionaire who ignored Lazarus at his gate. On the other hand, we admire the almsgiving of Zacchaeus who gave half his wealth to the poor, and in the Acts of the Apostles, the generous hospitality of the wealthy Lydia in Philippi.
God’s Kingdom transforms the values of this world into his own values, where we become instruments of the heart of God, even to the point where we eat the toast we hate out of love, a simple act we do for the ones we love. The above examples present to us what the person who lives or do not live the beatitudes, will become or not become those who are cursed.
We have examples around us today of saints who were changed slowly and rarely overnight. Mother Teresa, who decided to leave her comfortable convent in India, went out into the streets of Calcutta, where eventually her former students followed her. Dorothy Day who left behind her past life to become a saint for the poor and the street people, even though some in the Church claim because of her past she shouldn’t be claimed a saint. She had a daughter out of wedlock. I guess they claim the same for Merton.
These little acts of love, like eating toast with your wife because you love her, become virtues, that is, simple acts of love repeated over time become habits of the heart, which we call virtues. Just as little acts of meanness or laziness become vices. It is those little acts that will change us into a blessing or a curse, into a Zacchaeus and a Lydia, or into a cruel billionaire follower of the KKK or Nazi Party.
Who we associate will also affect our lives. That is why a loving faith community will change us over the years for the good, especially a faith community that continually reaches out beyond itself to real world like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa where all are welcome into their lives.
GOD IS BEAUTIFUL!
PART ONE: As God Is Creative, God Wants You to Be Creative!
I started our Introduction with an article from the Catholic Telegraph Magazine by Dr. Mary C. Levri titled If We Lose Beauty, We Lose Our Spiritual Sight. We will continue with Part One by another article from CTM by Dominick Albano titled God Wants You to Be Creative.
Even though we will talk about beauty in its different forms and gifts or talents, we will also talk about right at the beginning that everyone is called to be creative. The word ‘Artist’ is not just restricted to the professionals and the even the amateurs. Dominick Albano begins his article with a quote from author Kurt Vonnegut’s book A Man Without a Country.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
Albano mentions that there are three main reasons why people do not create.
1-They believe they can’t, 2-they shouldn’t, 3-or they are afraid of what other people will think.
And he mentions further that because there are classes and proper techniques, people think that they need to take them first to do the arts well, but also point out that one shouldn’t give up running just because you haven’t run in a marathon.
We certainly recognize good artists and those who excel, but “…recognizing excellence should never discourage someone from starting or doing.” He backs this up by reminding us that we are made in God’s image and so God invites us to create. “Creation is an act of God. It is the first, the foundation, and, ultimately, the redemptive.”
As I was beginning to start my walk this morning, I was greeted by one of the teachers, the Art Teacher. She reminded me of an exhibition of her Grade School students at Hyde Park Square Art Show. As we chatted while the students arrived, she mentioned how challenging it was to teach art in this time of Covid because of the restrictions that it places on the art class.
We discussed about how important Art and Music was to students, especially in these crazy times, so that the students have some way or medium to express themselves and be in touch with their feelings. I remember well the picture she shared with me from a Fourth-Grade student. She had asked them to draw a picture about a dream they had recently. This particular student had drawn a tree with red autumn leaves and a deep brown trunk that ran up the middle of the picture like a telephone pole. Peaking around the trunk was a well-drawn fox in an orange coat with thin black legs.
I was impressed with the overall drawing. But what really caught my attention was that the whole composition, while drawn on a white piece of paper, was folded like a brochure, one third of the right side was folded over and same for the left side, so that the two sides had to be opened up to view the completed picture. However, the student artist had cleverly cut out a window into the two folded sides so that part of the picture (dream) could be seen through this window. How creative! And this was from a fourth grader! I am sure that a psychologist could have a field day interpreting this child’s dream, but the student clearly saw the dream as a window to his inner life.
Could we say that our dreams are a creative force using bits and pieces from our memories to create a peak into our soul? Maybe God is inviting us to practice what we dream by being creative and feeding our souls with what our hearts desire. As we shall see that desire can be more than just pictures of people or scenery or objects. In our next part for something very different we will look at beauty in mathematics!?!
See Below – contains both files:
Five Main Questions on the Eucharist and
Outline of History of Eucharist