God heals the brokenhearted

The responsorial psalm of today’s liturgy, Ps. 10, voices the anguish of the people in Aurora, OH and all of us agonizing over what took place there.  It reads:

Why, O Lord, do you stand aloof?

Why hide in times of distress?

Proudly the wicked harass the afflicted,

Who are caught in the devices the wicked have contrived….

He lurks in ambush near the villages;

In hiding he murders the innocent;

His eyes spy upon the unfortunate….

You do see, you behold misery and sorrow,

Taking them in your hands,

On you the unfortunate [person] depends;

Of the [parentless] you are the helper. 

It may seem as though the Lord is standing aloof. But is He? He Himself was slaughtered in that murderous rampage, as Jesus tells us in   Mt. 25:40: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren you do unto Me.”  Every person killed, maimed, injured and traumatized by James Holmes is a son/daughter of God. God dwells in each of them and them in God. So God was not untouched by this murderous rampage and is not standing aloof. And it is God who will come to the aid of the brokenhearted, as the psalmist reminds us in Ps. 34: 18:  “Yahweh is near to the brokenhearted, he helps those whose spirit is crushed.”    

May the people of Aurora be comforted by the prayers of those of us not physically there to help. And may those who can give hands-on assistance do so in Jesus’ name. 

May James Holmes, obviously a very sick man, get the help he needs to heal, to feel remorse and repent of the crime that he committed.

Follow the Spirit's Counsel

In today Gospel,   Mt. 12: 1-8, Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees for going through a field of grain on the Sabbath and picking the heads of grain and eating them.  The Pharisees chastise him for “doing what is unlawful to do on the Sabbath.”  He tells them He “desires mercy, not sacrifice.”  How often, I thought, do I not judge myself mercilessly, demanding sacrifice of myself, or others, and not being compassionate and understanding.  I asked Jesus to further instruct me. So I switched to my non-dominant hand and began writing. The following is what came through my consciousness:

             _____(Insert your name       , doing what is right means being sensible and wise as the

             Spirit guides you. That is what I did.  I knew it was a Sabbath.  And Sabbath laws were

             strict about what you could do and not do on the Sabbath.

              ___(Insert your name)     , another person may have strict laws of what you can and

             cannot do. You, too, may be strongly opposed to what is right or wrong for another

             person. What you or the other person does not see is the Spirit’s counsel and wisdom

              directing the other to make the choice he or she is making. 

I was taught those same laws the Pharisees were reciting to Me. There is then God’s

law written on the heart that the Pharisees could not see. That law is written on

every person’s heart, including your own, and sometimes it brings you into the arena

of opposing forces that rear their heads within your own being or from the outside.

Will you follow the Spirit’s call or back down, following a law, which at that moment,

 in mercy and love, needs to be broken?

 That message hit me between the eyes! What about you?

God never abandons us

As we read today’s first reading, Is 10: 5-7, 13b-16, we might want to imagine how Jesus would say this to us. I came up with the following imaginative conversation parallel to Isaiah’s message to those who brought harm to Israel:

                Dorothy Ann, nations rose up against my people Israel. They boasted of their of

                crimes against my people: raping women, killing those left as orphans following

                a hostile, bloody takeover. They destroyed sacred vessels and confiscated treasures.

They boasted of their military prowess, their domination and destruction of all

that survived the massacre. These same abominations persist throughout the

world of today and have been a reality of one nation putting down another, one

ruler putting down his people, one violent individual putting down another.

My inheritance you inflict:

Widow and stranger you have slain in your wars,

the fatherless you have murdered with violent weapons

 or with violent words of gossip;

women you have raped; young girls and boys you have sold into the sex slave;

young men and women you have killed for drug money

or by the fleeting pleasure of gossip;

unborn infants you have slaughtered in the womb.

And you have the audacity to say, as Assyria said:

“By my own power I have done it,

And by my wisdom, for I am shrewd…

(L)ike a giant I have put down the enthroned….”  (cf. Is 10: 5-7, 13b-16)

God’s response to us is contained in today’s psalm (Ps. 94: 7-8, 9-10, 14-15)

                “Understand, you senseless ones

                of my people;

                and, you fools, when will you be wise?

                “Shall he who shaped the ear not hear?

                Or he who formed the eye not see?

                Shall he who instructs nations

                not chastise,

                he who teaches [human beings] knowledge?

                “For the Lord will not cast off his people

                nor abandon his inheritance;

                but judgment shall again be with justice,

                and all the upright of heart shall

                follow it.”

My response: O God, have mercy.

Giving Glory to God

 

A message from my recent retreat: My retreat opened with the Lord leading me to psalm 139: "I am wonderfully made." The thought came to me that all of us are created to radiate God's glory and that everything in our lives visits us for that same reason. Every person we encounter, all of the situations in which we engage are meant to both reveal God's glory to us and to be an vehicle through which we give glory to God. With that thought, I surrendered all of my concerns to the Lord and I prayed that I may glorify the Lord, serve the Lord in whatever I do or say and in the person I am becoming. The following prayer surfaced:

Lord, in Your on-going creaton of me, I give you:

the good and the bad,

the beautiful and the ugly

the impatient and the patient,

the vitriolic and the serene,

the selfish and the unselfish,

to be the clay that you use

to remold, reshape, and recreate

me into the woman you call me to become:

another Christ.

 

What do you give the Lord today and where, today, did you see the glory of God revealed?

Jesus' challenging mission: disturbing our peace

In today’s Gospel, Mt 10: 34-11:1, Jesus says to us: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s enemies will be those of his household.”  I said to the Lord: “Wow, that statement is enough to turn everyone away from Christianity and from reading the Bible.”  I imagined the Lord saying to me:

“Dorothy Ann, I know those words are harsh.  The Son of God took on human nature

 to save each person from death. To reverse that sentence of death, which Satan thrust

 upon the world by his lies, would entail “the sword” of grace, violence toward evil, and

the strength to stand by Truth to follow God’s ways in the face of fierce opposition from

 those who are closest to you—family members. Truth confronts falsehood mainly within

the family. Choosing my Father’s will, many times,  comes in conflict with family members
who insist on a choice that is contrary to what God is asking of a son/daughter, a daughter/

son-in-law.  Tempers fly even to the point of imprisonment and bloodshed,  lawsuits and

 legal wrangling. It happened to me; it will happen to my disciples. And in today’s world

that is attempting to destroy the Sacred, division within families—natural, liturgical, political

 and religious—is increasing.

Hold fast to the faith you have been given!

What a clear message of what this passage could mean.  It made sense to me. What about you?

Having the courage to speak our truth

Today is the feast of St. Thomas, the Apostle, a Martyr for his faith. It was Thomas who said to the apostles that he would not believe that the Lord had risen from the dead unless he put his hands in his side and his finger into the print of the nails.  We refer to Thomas as the Doubter. What if we took another look at Thomas as one who did not follow the crowd, was not a pushover,  did his own thinking, shared his own truth.  He did not hide his doubts, as did the other apostles.  The others doubted as much as he did, would not believe the women when they returned from the tomb and told them that they had seen the Lord and he was risen. Nor  did the other apostles believe the disciples from Emmaus when they, too, reported that the Lord  was alive and spoke with them.

Who would you or I be? A pushover, one who says what everyone else says because they said it, one who says what “the authority” said (Peter was the one with the authority) because authority said it whether we believed it or not, one who hid his/her truth or his/her doubt, as most of the apostles did? Or would we have the humility to acknowledge our doubt as Thomas did? Would we change our position when the truth was revealed to us, as Thomas did when he fell to his knees and said: “My Lord and my God!” “You were right and I was wrong.”

God's touch: personable and individual

Today’s Gospel, Mk 5: 21-43, reveal a God of love and compassion,  a God who cares about each one of us. Jairus, a synagogue official, approaches Jesus and asked that he heal his daughter who is dying. A huge crowd is following Jesus. A woman haemorrhaging for twelve years, having exhausted her means in various failed and painful treatments, touches the hem of Jesus’ garment  and is healed. He knows that power left Him and turns around and asks: “Who touched me?”  When the woman, trembling, comes forth and tells Him her story, He says to her: “Woman, your faith has saved you.”  God knows when we approach Him. He also knows when power leaves Him and changes our lives. Our God is a personal God, not a distant God. God’s personableness and gentleness are also revealed in His healing of Jairus’ twelve-year-old daughter, who is “dead,” according to the  people who had been keeping vigil at Jairus’ house. Jesus goes to her room and says to the little girl: “Talitha koum,” which means “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” She does so and Jesus tells the family to get her something to eat. What caring and what attention to detail in terms of need. That is who God is!  How do you experience the personableness, the tenderness, the gentleness, God’s individual attention in your life?