by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
“In the cosmology of Jesus’ time, God and the heavens were up and human beings and Earth were below. Our 2,000-year-old gospel tells the story of the risen Jesus’ return to God in the cosmology everyone assumed in the first century. To return to God is to go to the heavens. As the Church celebrates Jesus’ ascension into heaven in 2013, we wonder where he goes, where God’s home is. We hunger for lasting communion with our loved ones.”
How do you imagine communion with God?
Then Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them. As he blessed them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.
The ascension is the hinge event between Jesus’ resurrection and his sending of the Spirit. Luke ends his gospel with Jesus’ departure and begins the Acts of the Apostles with the same moment.
In the ascension Jesus passes over into communion with God, bridging the human and divine. He blesses this company of followers about to become a Spirit-filled community, witnesses to the paschal mystery of Jesus’ passage from death to new life.
How do you understand where the risen Jesus is? How do you imagine the communion with his Father to which the risen Jesus returns?
A third time Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was hurt because Jesus had asked him a third time, “Do you love me?” So Peter said to him: “Lord, you know everything. You know well that I love you.”
Jesus answered, “Feed my sheep.”
John 21.17
The three repetitions remind us of the three times Peter denied Jesus in the courtyard of the high priest. In that scene Peter, afraid for his life, refused to own up to any connection with Jesus. Here by the lake, Jesus asks him to affirm that they still stand together in love and mission. Jesus gives Peter a responsibility but not a superior role. Peter is to feed, tend, and love the community, not lord it over the flock.
How have Church pastors tended and nourished you?
Jesus said, “You became a believer because you saw me. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.”
John 20:29
Thomas occupies center stage in the second half of Sunday’s gospel. Thomas’s doubt and subsequent faith parallel the mystery of how later generations of Christians grow into faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Thomas touches Jesus’ hands, feet, and side for all of us who are not among the first witnesses.
In every believer’s life, the community’s faith sometimes must carry the doubts of an individual. By including the story of Thomas’s doubt and faith, John’s community challenges itself to faith in Jesus’ presence and absence.
Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and Jesus appeared to her.
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”
John 20:18
Mary Magdalene hears a man she supposed to be the gardener speak her name. Like the sheep who know the shepherd’s voice in John 10, she recognizes Jesus’ voice. In John 20, the evangelist’s resurrection chapter, people come to faith in Jesus in multiple ways. The beloved disciple sees and believes. Mary Magdalene hears and believes.
Jesus commissions Mary Magdalene to tell his disciples he is risen. She is the first witness of the resurrection and the one sent to tell the others—the apostle to the apostles.
What do you hear in Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus that affirms your faith?
Joan Mitchell, CSJ celebrated her Golden Jubilee as a Sister of St. Joseph this week. She gave this reflection to her fellow Jubilarians on St. Joseph’s Day.
Fifty years ago when our reception walked down the aisle at St. Kate’s Chapel in wedding dresses and left in black with new names, we committed to serving a Church that cloistered its women and kept us apart, but it was also a Church awakening with John XXIII to the modern world. In 1959 he had written his human rights manifesto Pacem in Terris to the people of the whole world, and less than a month after we entered, the Second Vatican Council began in October 1962.
Joan Mitchell, CSJ
The work of the liturgical movement came to fruition when the Council in its first action turned our altars around for dialogue between priest and people and gave us worship in English so we could participate fully, actively, and consciously.
The Council recognized the whole people of God as the Church and called every person to holiness, “God does not save us as individuals without any bond or link between us,” it said, “but as a people to serve God in holiness.”
In 1965, Council ended and in its final document called us into solidarity with the human family: “the joys and sorrows, griefs and anxieties of the people of this world, especially the poor and afflicted, are the joys and sorrows, griefs and anxieties of the people of God.” The theologies of Vatican II formed us irreparably as they rolled off the press.
That same miraculous year, 1965, the Civil Rights Voting Act passed. The someday the Civil Rights Movement sang about, “We shall overcome…someday,” came at last, freedom came at last. We were in the laundry when we heard President Kennedy had been shot. When we heard Dr. King had been killed in April 1968, cloister was gone and we went out and joined the African American community to mourn this gifted leader.
We were still protesting the Vietnam War, but the 60s were a decade of dreams—of a modern Church and an America without racism. It has left us perennially hopeful and ultimately at odds with the Church in retreat from the world our leaders often label secular but which we claim as our own. Whoever thought Rome would investigate us for doing too much social justice, for speaking out and stepping up to help people who are poor have health care? As Sisters of St. Joseph and Consociates, we are people of dreams. Like the universal Church we have as our patron Joseph the dreamer.
Joseph is uneasy with the obvious when he finds his fiancé pregnant with a child he knows is not his own. Joseph doesn’t want to expose Mary to the law or the stoning it could require. He is a just man, used to doing the right thing. So Joseph plans to send Mary away quietly—until he sleeps on his decision.
I sleep on my side, so when I hear this gospel passage and picture it in my mind, I see Joseph lying down and turning over on his side, leaving the day of his disappointment in Mary behind and turning toward a new day.
His going to sleep is a contemplative act, entrusting himself to rest in the midst of personal turmoil. In his sleep Joseph’s relationship with Mary draws him into relationship with the child. He dreams he will name and claim the child as his own. His turning toward sleep results in changing his society; he disregards its laws, alters conventional expectations for marriage, and finds the living God acting not in the temple but in the young woman he cherishes—the power of relationships to transform the world.
Who would think sleep could change the future of the world? Who would think 50 years could bring so much change? In 1964 when we were still novices and Paul VI spoke at the United Nations before the third session of the Council, the Hubble telescope confirmed that all these galaxies and stars that light up our nights are moving away from each other—the cosmos is expanding, the big bang.
All that is bursts forth out of nothingness from a single seed of energy, A flaring forth so powerful the cosmos is still becoming more.
We live in a story that we cannot flip to the end and find the conclusion.
We live in this story among its characters.
We live in a vast pregnancy 13.7 billion years long and counting.
It turns out that Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and the magi were right to see promise in the stars and hold this promise in faith.
Right now the Large Hadron Collider is smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light, looking for traces of the god particle, what gives matter mass and joins everything together, the secret to how our unfolding story began.
In the world of the tiny, the quantum world, cause and effect go out the window.
Waves become particles when we measure to determine where they are going, and yet over time they dance into patterns, self-organizing into new wholes.
As Sisters of St. Joseph and as Consociates we find this dance deep within, this persisting desire for more, for communion, harmony, justice, this openness to God.
We live not only in an infinity of vastness and an infinity of smallness but in an infinity of relationships, the web of life.
Everything that is wants to become more.
Within our bodies we hold this story of our evolving, this drive toward greater, more complex wholes.
Our blood runs red with the iron forged in the super novas of stars.
The bacteria that first awakened to life 4 billion years ago are our ancestors.
The microbes that learned to eat oxygen 2 billions years ago live on in our mitochondrial DNA and fuel us within every cell.
We inherit our eyes from bacteria that first moved toward light, our backbones from the fish, our erect two-footed posture from the apes that left the trees for the plains.
We humans are the universe become conscious of itself, become its singers and healers.
Then in Jesus Christ Holy Wisdom finds a prophet, God becomes one of us.
We live in a fourth infinity—the horizon Jesus’ resurrection sets in our sights, a future in our hands and hearts—a dream of all that love can give life and make new. We participate in the creative power that Jesus reveals at the heart of God: love.
All of us come here tonight suspended in mystery, challenged to do justice on earth.
How did the years pile up so fast? What is my future and our future? Will Pope Francis like his patron rebuild our Church to benefit the poor and heal the abused?
In this mystery that is vastly big, infinitely small, and complexly diverse, we stand together buoyed by faith and challenged to use our power to love and give life, inspired by the Spirit who breathes in our breaths and dances in our heartbeats to cocreate the future, inspired by Joseph’s small act to keep turning toward every new day.
Sunday’s gospel takes us to a mountaintop for a God’s-eye view of things to come in the life of Jesus and his companions. In everyday life a mountain often symbolizes a struggle. We contend with mountains of paperwork. The demands of work and struggles against serious illness are uphill battles. Americans seeking professional or social achievement climb the ladder of success. People who are poor work to climb out of poverty.
On the mount of transfiguration, Jesus and his disciples experience neither success or vision but an overshadowing cloud. However, this is no ordinary cloud shielding them with its shadow from bright sun and providing coolness in the heat. This is the shekinah (sheh-KI-nah), the cloud of God’s presence that accompanied the people of Israel in the desert – the cloud that rested over the tent of meeting where Israel kept the tablets of its covenant with God, a cloud that is luminous by day and fiery by night.
This excerpt from Sunday by Sunday is by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
In the gospel for the 1st Sunday of Lent the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness, where he duels with the devil. The Spirit fills Mary, Elizabeth, Zachariah, and Simeon before descending upon Jesus at his baptism and leading him into the desert. All these activities culminate in Jesus’ first preaching, his inaugural address in his hometown synagogue. He reads from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me and has anointed me to bring glad tiding to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year of God’s favor” (4.18-19). Jesus rolls up the scroll, sits down, and with all eyes on him, develops his first sermon—9 words in English, under 50 letters, perfect for Twitter: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I am that Spirit-filled prophet.
The Holy Spirit anoints Jesus to stir up a year of favor, the jubilee year the Old Testament Book of Leviticus requires every 50 year to give the poor a fresh start, to prevent a permanent underclass.
Makes me wonder what the Holy Spirit is stirring up in our time. Pope Benedict has done something new is resigning, an act of humility. He’s done what he can with the strength he has. Benedict set in motion a Year of Faith that celebrates the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. Fifty, hum, could it be time for a jubilee year in the Church, a new beginning? By my lights we profoundly need a Spirit-filled leader who can reengage the Church with the needs of the times and find God coming from the future and not only the past.
Once on a two-hour car ride with my youngest sister and her youngest daughter, we shared our answers to the questions: What two people have most influenced you in your life? My two were both wise, learned women older than me. My sister’s two were her children. Her answer stunned me. I hadn’t thought about learning from younger people. As a nun I don’t have children to learn from, and of course, neither do the cardinals who will gather on March 15 to elect a new pope. Will they elect a leader like their predecessors who appointed them?
How does the Holy Spirit work in our world? Richard Gaillardetz maintains that one of the most important acts of the Second Vatican Council happened in the first 15 minutes when the bishops voted to recess rather than accept the list of bishops the Curia proposed for membership on the commissions preparing council documents. The bishops gathered, met one another in language groups, and learned about each others’ abilities. A greater diversity of members on the commissions resulted. Diversity opened the doors to the Spirit. So did, celebrating Eucharist during the Council in various rites, the Byzantine, Syriac, Melekite. The bishops experienced a bigger church than most knew.
Already in 1963, some bishops noticed the Council included Protestant observers but no Catholic women. Cardinal Suenens led the rally to include women. Carmel McEnroe tells about the 23 women who attended Vatican II as auditors in the book Guests in Their Own House. The woman were heads of international organizations of lay people and heads of religious orders, except for one married woman, who with her husband were the head couple in Mexico of the Christian Family Movement. They had 12 children. She had a big job representing married Catholics. The 23 women contributed most to the commission that preparing the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. the document closest to the Spirit-filled mission that Jesus announces in his inaugural message, the document that calls Catholics into solidarity with those in our world poor and afflicted. It is the fullest statement of Catholic social teaching and human rights. Here is a paragraph the women succeeded in getting into the document.
“With respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language, or religion is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent (GS29).
Now is a crucial time for we the People of God, the whole People of God, the Baptized, male and female, clergy and laity to participate fully, actively, consciously in our life as Church. Now is a time to pray for sure. Now is also a time to let the Spirit of God do something new in all of us. Benedict started to twitter online. Maybe we can create access to the cardinals online. We can give voice to the needs of the poor, the need for women to become fully equal in the Church, the need to welcome and connect with alienated Catholic. Let the whole Church find ways to text and tweet, blog, and send cards and emails, dialogue with our neighbors, and be part of the election. Visit Futurechurch.org.
I heard Father Geoffrey Diekmann speak on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Vatican II. Someone raised a hand and asked him why there were no women scripture scholars on the committee that created the new lectionary. “We never thought of it then,” he said. What about now?
As we begin Lent, Jesus challenges us to live God’s word as he does. May the Holy Spirit lead us as well as the Irish say to speak the truth and shame the devil.
While Jesus was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly two men were talking with him—Moses and Elijah.
Luke 9.29-30
The dazzling, transforming light suggests divine presence. As he prays, Jesus’ inner life and light become transparent in his outward appearance, just as our values and commitments show through in our bodies over our lifetimes. His spirit and body are one. Two great prophets of Israel’s past come alive in Jesus’ consciousness to lead him on as he prepares to set his face for Jerusalem.
Who do you know whose spirit seems transparent in his or her face or body? What do you hope shows forth in you?
