Strangers and Aliens No Longer

In the first reading this morning, St. Paul makes a critical statement about our individual predicament. He says emphatically, “you are strangers and aliens no longer.” Few of us have actually suffered the isolating fate of the foreigner, actually being for a long time a long way from home and what is culturally familiar, but, all of us, at some time or another in our lives have felt like a stranger, an outsider, someone tossed around and left out relationships, conversations, jobs or opportunities. For some of us that sting of being the stranger is the only emotional space we have ever known.

We’ve had those moments when we were deeply lonely, in need of a good friend, and no one came along. We’ve been through times when we needed to feel included and useful and, instead, were made to feel as if we didn’t belong to anything or anyone around us. Each of us has probably suffered as the butt of someone else’s jokes, the subject of some group’s ugly gossip, never really part of the in-crowd, emotionally out of step and religiously out of sync with those around us. We’ve felt alienated from the present regime of things, feeling somehow neither left nor right, perhaps progressive in a conservative time or traditional in a liberal age. We’ve been the round peg in a square hole, a half beat off the syncopated normal rhythm of things. We have been the stranger if not to the world surely to ourselves for longer than we can remember – never quite knowing why we cry with an un-nameable ache inside when the world around us seems steeped in joy.  When we look back at things, we were doing penance when we should have been laughing. We were playing when we should have been planning for the more difficult days to come. In short, we know what St. Paul is talking about. We have indeed, all of us at some time or another, been strangers and aliens to life as it is, life as it could and should be, at some point and maybe at many points in our lives.

The fear behind all of these moments is the existential terror that we are profoundly alone in this world and, worse yet, that we are the cause of our own alienation and the source of our own strange separation in the world.

But, then the good news: his Gospel declaration that we are strangers and aliens no longer. Something has happened to us from beyond us that makes a powerful difference in our situation. It’s not something from us, but it is powerfully about us. It is something Paul is convinced that the dying love of Jesus has accomplished for each of us. And it is this.

That ache of alienation that we feel, that sting of strangeness that comes over us, is no longer a sign that we are by design empty and alone in a broken and crass world. That ache and sting is a signal and a call that we belong somewhere else or, in a more Pauline way of saying things, we belong to Someone Else. All of our lives we thought we belonged to the things around us. We wanted to fit into the norms, the conditions and the culture that surrounded us. We wanted to be part of the group that controlled the playground, the team that defined the region, the council that determined the congregation, and the family that pulled the heartstrings. We just wanted to fit in. And, in trying to fit in, we squeezed ourselves into the norms and goals, the aspirations and expectations of anyone and everyone around us.

But, St. Paul reminds us that we were made for only One other – Jesus Christ. He is the One our heart has been waiting for. He is the One that our souls have been aching for. We cannot fit into the world until we fit into Him, because “all were created through Him and all were created for Him.”

The world on its own terms is like a maze in a cornfield with innumerable dead-ends, obstacles and roadblocks. After generations of sinful thinking, plotting and planning, roads that look promising and streets that seem lined with golden hopes end up with walls that divide us. So that, at the end of the day, on our own and by our own political and ecclesiastical devices, we are left with culture wars, tribal conflicts, gender fights, racial discriminations, and divisions over orientation.

But, St. Paul tells us a deep truth. Christ, by His death, has broken down the walls that divide us. In Christ, there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, neither Jew nor Gentile. We construct the dividing lines but, before God, there are no cultures, tribes, genders, races or orientations.

We have yet to understand the meaning of our Communion. As St. Paul says, there is One Lord and one Father of us all. And, before this good and gracious God, we are one, each of us accepted and acknowledged, received and redeemed, supported and saved for a life eternal in God’s infinite love, now and forever. Amen.

The Globalization of Indifference and the Franciscan Imagination

 This week I was asked to give a lecture to the university community on globalization. I chose to speak about "the globalization of indifference." There are many benefits to globalization, including the ability to transport goods and services and even the most common of our ideas and ideals across borders faster, cheaper and deeper than ever before.

And yet, the volume and velocity of change have psychological effects on groups. And, one of them is the potential for indifference and apathy to become globalized.

After tracing this potential, we look at the elements of a Franciscan imagination. Bill Short's article on a "Franciscan Language for the 21st century" provides a framework for us to consider how a Franciscan way of thinking can challenge a pull back from solidarity at times when traditional borders and boundaries collapse around us.

The students' reaction was positive and supportive. It's one of the great advantages of being on a university campus. The full text has been published at the following website:


https://www.academia.edu/8839118/The_Globalization_of_Indifference_and_the_Franciscan_Imagination

Celebrating Columbus Day?

When I was a child, Columbus Day was celebrated with grand stories of adventure and discovery. We took time in grammar school to color the three ships, The Nina, The Pinta, and The Santa Maria. We didn't question the context of Columbus' voyages. We didn't doubt his selfless and courageous motives. We didn't ask about the massacres that occurred or the diseases that were transported. We actually believed that Columbus discovered America in 1492, although there was already a people firmly planted here with a rich culture and history. Our viewpoint was deeply Euro-centric.

How do we continue to celebrate this day of contradictions? As a people we admire exploration, discovery, and the courage it takes to take risks. At the same time, we are ashamed of the slave trade that developed after Columbus "sailed the ocean blue" to replenish the coffers of Ferdinand and Isabella.

This morning's Scripture readings provide an interesting look at the intersection between discovery and slavery.

In the first reading from Galatians,  Paul speaks of two covenants as two ways of living one’s life:  one way leads to slavery and the other leads to freedom. He says we have a choice. We can live as slaves to our fears, our anxieties, our frustrations and disappointments or we can live with a freedom that wells up (by God's grace) from deep inside. 

It is still a choice, an open choice, that each of us must face. And yet, we naively think that we are all already free. None of us likes to believe that we are under any kind of inner confinement. We like to believe that our minds are clear, our motives are pure, and our actions are more or less authentic. But, St. Paul reminds us that we are prone to "slave" thinking, biased and prejudiced in a way that reinforces our own needs and wants over the concerns and challenges of others. He suggests that we all start as slaves.

And whether one is a slave or not is not a function of whether good or bad things have happened to you. Bad things happen to good people and, surprisingly, wonderful things happen to bad people. Circumstances are relatively the same for those thinking like slaves and those thinking like men and women who are free. Both get sick. Both face troubles. There are slave-thinking people who are rich and free thinking people who are poor.

Slavery and freedom are attitudes of mind and heart that interpret events differently.

The difference is found in our disappointments and discontents.

We are slaves when we live our lives from an attitude of deep disappointment. We are slaves when we demand that life be other than it is. We demand that our superiors be more understanding, our sisters  more accommodating, our health better, our days longer and our joys more enduring than they are. We convince ourselves that life hasn’t been fair to us and we can’t be what we need to be because of the bad hand we’ve been dealt. Because of this, we are slaves to our desire to have another world, another set of circumstances. We are slaves of our distorted and unrealistic expectations of the world.

Freedom begins the moment we accept the world as it truly is. We can certainly wish that the world were freer from pain and suffering. We can definitely desire that we didn’t have to deal with bias and sin as much as we do. But, realizing how the world truly is, freedom means working within the world as it is given, with the graces we receive. We don’t fight it with our anger. We don’t get back at it with our grudges. We don’t escape it with our cynicism.

St. Paul reminded us last week that, even after having been brought up to the third heaven where he experienced a mystical union with God, God let stand a “thorn in the flesh,” which Paul asked to be released from. But, Christ told him that “my grace is sufficient for you.” And, Paul was fine with that. Paul was free with that.

So, today we have a choice. We can start the day as a slave to our disappointments or we can be free, because life (as it is) is good enough – good enough to bring enough love and hope,  goodness and kindness from the God who is taking care of us, each and every day.

And so, we can celebrate Columbus Day as a real choice in a real world. We can reject slave thinking so as to discover a more beautiful world without bias, prejudice or discrimination -- against anyone.

Adam Smith and St. Francis - Justice and What Bothers Us

In his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," Adam Smith offers us a picture of our motivations for justice--

"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity."

The benevolent "man of humanity" would "express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people" and "make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of life."

But, after all these musings, life would return to normal, Smith suggests. "And when all this fine philosophy was over,  when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened."

Then, Smith then imagines how we react to much smaller difficulties in our lives. "The most frivilous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own."

Smith is not far off. How often have we seen Christians more excised over the minor slights and inconveniences done them than they are about the great violence and injustices against the poor, the vulnerable and excluded minorities? We tolerate and excuse the big banks that very nearly collapsed the world's economy back in 2008, bringing none of their chief executives to account. But, we demand that the poor keep to every dot and tittle of the law, sometimes at the price of their lives, as Ferguson, MO., teaches us recently.

St. Francis saw this insane logic in his own day. He created a new enterprise that turned motivations upside down. He asked that his followers take on the perspective of the poor, the vulnerable and the excluded before they claimed their own rights. It was his theology of dispossession that opened up a new ethical space for the engagement of the politics of his time. Revenge and vendetta were the order of his day, where people were consumed (as Smith later suggests) by their own "frivolous disasters" more than with the really dreadful calamities of the world. Francis knew that the only way to release us from our self interests would be by a strategy of dispossession that took us each and every time by vow to the "lowest point"/ the marginal side of things. And it is from that liminal place that we would see clearly the whole grand scheme of things, a justice more freed from our self interested needs and biases.

Francis provides a dynamic that Smith did not pursue but which could have more securely anchored his economics.

Consumerism, Human Trafficking and the Franciscan Imagination

St. Bonaventure University provides a "core" course for every student entitled, "The Catholic-Franciscan Heritage" (popularly known as "Cat-Fran"). I got to teach two classes last week, my first  to undergraduates. I chose as my topic, "Consumerism, Human Trafficking and the Franciscan Imagination."

We studied the range of modern human slavery: upwards of 30 million people, tens of thousands trafficked into the US every year. There are more slaves today than during the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade before the Civil War.

Human trafficking is big business - a $38 billion dollar a year industry.

I am going to be giving a public lecture on the topic in New York City in February.

St. Francis of Assisi provides inspiration and direction to this modern problem. St. Francis refused to allow his followers even to touch coins. In a time of incredible greed and violence, he didn't want people to be equated (or reduced) to the coins they held and the money they could accumulate. St Francis believed that no coin could adequately contain the beauty, dignity or value of any brother or sister.

But, consumerism and materialism has disenchanted our world. God's creation has been reduced to matter and we have turned it into "stuff." Without God as an objective background and foreground of things, humanity becomes nothing more than "stuff" that can be easily bought and sold, like every other commodity of life.

That's one of the reasons why we must resist consumerism as the all-encompassing narrative of our time. God remains our best protection and our refuge.

Rahner and Francis

The great 20th century theologian, Karl Rahner, faced a dilemma. How do we know and speak of God once we accept that knowledge is suffused even in part with subjectivity, bias and the ever present reality of distortion? Is the knowledge of God possible after Cartesian doubt and the Kantian split between reason and faith? How do we know God; where do we find God?

I have spent some time tonight listening to Richard Lennan discourse on Rahner as "the theologian of grace." One has to stand in awe of both the genius and the courage of Rahner's thought. One has to be grateful for the elegance of Rahner's insight that God is the Vorgrif (horizon) of every act of thinking, willing and knowing -- that what we are reaching for in every thought, in the very act of thinking, is the fullness of being itself. It is never enough for us as humans to be satisfied with the limited and partial. We want the fullness and the abundance that stands as background to everything we muse and wonder about.

And it is the generosity of God to be the mystery that unfolds and reveals Itself to us in the smallest and most insignificant moments of living. That is what Rahner was trying to express for a world weary with the horrific spectacle of its violence and wars. He wanted to assure us that God can be known, more precisely God can be experienced, in the ordinary canons of every day life.

Is it too much of a stretch to draw a line from Francis to Rahner? Didn't Francis also fall in awe before the wonder of a God who revealed "Himself" elegantly and eloquently in the humblest realities of living? One of our amazing staff members spoke of this today as the Franciscan belief in "extraordinary goodness." God radiates extraordinary goodness and calls us to it, as well.

Where Rahner and Francis intersect is at the point of humility. God reveals majestic goodness in humility, God's power in powerlessness, and God's fullness in emptiness.

One can only be grateful to those great and humble people of faith who unpacked the beauty of God -- Francis, Bonaventure, Clare, Rahner and Lennan. They speak of the absolute beauty of the divine, because of the love and extraordinary goodness they have experienced in the Christ.

Look at the ordinary. Let it reveal itself as it truly is -- suffused with extraordinary goodness that is endowed and given by the graciousness of the Christ, the Logos of God.

The Not so Random Acts of Kindness

I was walking from my office across campus to the friary for a very quick lunch. It was another one of those very busy days, when the mind cramps with what one thinks are "weighty" matters of planning -- curriculum development, faculty hires, syllabus revisions, and a whole host of other re-engineering problems.

As I crossed in front of the library, a student invited me to lunch at the Dining Hall. His treat. At first, I was uncomfortable. I didn't want the student to pay for me. But, the moment called for humility and gratitude, not bravado. Even friars have to learn how to receive. We had a great lunch.

It was an act of kindness on the part of this student, just pure generosity. It made me realize just how much this world depends on generosity each and every day for its survival and quality. The experience made me think of all the other acts of kindness I might have missed today, all those people who contributed to the quality of my life and those around me, without fanfare and without need for reciprocation. Thank you, all for this goodness. And, thank you, Jason.

There is a font for all this goodness and generosity. Goodness is not an accident of time and space. It flows from an originating source, from the Logos, the Christ. "All were created through Him; all were created for Him; He is before all else that is." Jesus is the originating source of all graciousness. He is good and shares His goodness with all. To Him be all the glory.

The Amazing Compassion of God

The parables of Jesus are a never-ending trove of wisdom and grace. No matter how many times I proclaim and preach Jesus' incredible stories, I always come away with something new, something deep, and something to challenge the narrow confines of my spiritual and pastoral life. Yesterday was no different.

It was the parable of the Good Samaritan. The ancient hatred between Jews and Samaritans is a familiar theme. The reasons for it are also familiar: the Great Exile that took the Jews into foreign slavery and left a remnant (Samaritans) to eke out a horrible existence without the Temple, without the priesthood, without familiar rituals and under horrible economic and social conditions. To their mind, they did the best they could -- developing new prayer forms, marrying and building their family lives, holding the memory of Yahweh against tremendous odds. They expected respect and gratitude when the exiled returned. Instead, they got scorn and derision. Thus began the ancient rivalry that is the subtext of this parable.

In a world divided between the clean and unclean, there was no need for the Samaritan to reach into the ditch to help the Jew in peril. The inherited rules of compassion didn't apply to religious enemies. Apparently they didn't apply either to the priest and Levite, either.

But, the Samaritan feels mercy in his heart, a mercy that will transform him. Having "done" mercy once to a sworn enemy, he can never act afterwards with the same old justification, the same old denial, the same old enmity. This one act of compassion will transform how he relates. It will suspend the world of the clean and the unclean forever. And this is Jesus' point.

Mercy is the new rule of the covenant He came to bring. Inclusion is the new norm of catholicity that He came to establish. All other justifications for inaction and exclusion are degraded.

Behind this parable stands a truth that explodes every theory of passivity. God never passes by a ditch of human suffering. God never walks to the opposite side of the road. The death of Jesus reveals the stunning truth of God's kenotic love. He enters the ditch of human misery. The Creed says it, "he descended into hell." Thus, the power and range of Jesus' amazing love.

The parable rocks with meaning time after time, after time.

Francis - Naked without Protection

 Here's the homily delivered at the Feast of St. Francis Celebration at St. Bonaventure University

Every Franciscan has their favorite image, their favorite story, from the life of Francis. Mine comes from the afternoon when, at the age of 25, he is dragged into the village square to confront his father. His father is enraged, sick and tired of his son selling off the family business, giving away his hard earned money to the scum of the earth. He wants his money back. And, Francis is sick and tired of being the poster child for his father’s fashion business, strutting the streets of Assisi like they were the ravenous runways of France. Most of all, he is tired of a culture madly obsessed by greed and violence. Having gone to war, he has seen his friends butchered and left on the bloody floor of the Umbrian Valley.

As the world’s first Millennial, he wants out. He wants more, more than Daddy can pay for and more than his hometown can provide. And so, he strips. In a profound gesture of aspiration, he takes off all his clothes, throws away every trace of fashion, and stands naked before the world, naked with nothing now but the earth and God. He is naked before the naked God.

Francis is going for broke. He wants an intimacy deeper than the hook up culture of his day. He wants a truth beyond the deadly vendettas and polarizing polemics of his times.  All his life, he has played the games and followed the rules of polite snobbery that kept everything and everyone at a safe but unsatisfying distance. He doesn’t want to use women anymore. He doesn’t want to play a religious paddy-cake with God anymore. He wants to live his life, not act out someone else’s dream.

And so, he stands– naked to the world and naked before God. He is stripping not to let go of the world, but to receive it. His poverty is not to experience the scarcity of life, the mere crumbs of existence, but to open himself fully to the abundance of life.

He is standing naked before God and daring God to be absolutely and totally naked before him. He wants God and He dares God to empty God’s self in all God’s fullness into him. Francis becomes empty to receive the fullness of God.

Francis is absolutely going for broke here, because there was no model for what he was doing. Every other saint who had gone naked before him had used protection – monasteries, convents, rules and constitutions, dowries and the precaution that comes from being revered as clergy. They had experienced God but always with a filter, always with a safety net in case something went wrong. Francis wanted none of that. He wanted intensity, and not Nietzsche’s later cheap form of it. He was naked, without protection, before the world, before the sun and moon and stars. Naked before the naked mysteries of creation and God, going for broke.

Francis wanted to know what life felt like without interference. He wanted to know what joy and suffering were like without defenses, existence without the hidden agenda and false premises of other people’s scripts. He wanted life in its raw and naked form, without protection. He would go into the world now without shelter and defense, because he felt safe with God. He had come to know what even bishops and priests had forgotten—that God was good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone.

Brothers and sisters, college is one of those very rare moments in life when we can go for broke. Four years to really stand vulnerable before the mysteries and questions of life.

Let’s not be naïve. We all come here with baggage. We are all the product of our family’s hopes, our culture’s agenda, and our economy’s greed. Business and marketing majors know this. By the time children are three, they can already identify 100 brand logos. Psychology majors know this. By the time children are four, they already feel stress to identify with a particular product. We are programmed to make someone else’s hopes become real and make someone else’s fortunes go higher.

But, college is that absolutely unique, once in a life-time opportunity to stand “exposed” not just before the world, but also before the mystery of God and answer Francis’ two questions:

Who are you, Lord, and who am I?

This university is your time to break through the half-baked theories of the good life that Kim Kardasian and her tribe of clowns and entertainers peddles. It’s our time to question, to muse, to ponder, and to crack open and test every promise of hope and recipe for happiness.

We’ve got to go for broke, whether we’re faculty, students, religious, and alumni.  If we are going to be true to our Franciscan roots, if we are going to earn our title as this country’s first (and best) Franciscan university, we – faculty and students—have got to go for broke.

Students, we are not here to make you cogs in the wheels of someone else’s greed and violence. We are not here to make you fit into a world that can’t make you happy and can’t satisfy your hopes.

We are here to invite you to be brokers for peace, lovers of truth, brothers and sisters to the poor and suffering, to find a love that lasts and a happiness that fulfills.

We want you in the marketplace not just to make money, but to make room for the down and out. We want you in the public square not to peddle some cheap polemic of polarization but to promote justice and the promise of a sustainable planet, God’s blessed creation.

And so, a young man stands naked in the village square and looks around at us tonight. And he tempts us with the promise of a love that can fill the infinity of the heart with a peace that passes all understanding, if we stand naked before the naked God, who is good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone, now and forever. Amen.

What is the Good Life?

The French philosopher, Luc Ferry, in his book, What is the Good Life? (2005), asks whether it is still possible to speak of meaning, value, ethics, happiness and beatitude, in a "disenchanted" world once and for all stripped of divinity. Is it possible to ponder and pursue a meaningful life in a deconstructed world stripped of every trace of divinity, reducible only to technology, finitude, brokenness and death? Using Nietzche as his guide, he is trying to trace a new secular soteriology, in the "intensity" of what he calls the "eternal recurrence" of the instants, the here and now and never the "beyond."

I can't help but think that Ferry is constructing a new stoicism, an amor fati of the present that demands a heroic that posits (imposes artificial) meaning on the chaotic fragments that deconstruction has hammered out for us. He sees or imposes a cosmological order on the universe without a surviving Logos to stabilize or secure anything in place. I am not yet convinced that he has succeeded.

But, give Ferry his due, modern philosophy has left young people today without salvation and without meaning. For them, every moment is an eternity of their own competing interests, ultimately destined to disappoint because everything is unhinged from any mooring whatsoever. Ferry sees the disaster in this and wants to rally philosophy to its ancient task of "salvation" by other means.

Modern education has to confront the question that Ferry poses -- is there such a thing as a "good life" in a deconstructed world? And what is the "good life" that we are proposing to students? One of the threats of modern education is that we simply ignore the question and give our students only the tools to make a living, have a career, and ply their trade in the marketplace. We introduce them to technology but leave the deeper questions of meaning, hope, love and life to chance. It's hard for a Catholic university to compete with this prevailing allure of avoidance, when the forces of consumerism are so strong. But, we do have an alternative.

The Franciscan imagination posits an alternative narrative of what is the good life. Like Nietzche, it involves a stripping, a sort of deconstruction, but not to scarcity or emptiness and not to Nietzche's limited version of the "intense" life of disconnected "instants." We posit a stripping to experience abundance. This is the significance of St. Francis' initial gesture before his father. He is stripping not to "let go" as if to disencumber himself of the baggage of the universe and arrive at a purity of solitude. Just the opposite.

Francis is stripping for the sake of abundance. He goes naked to experience the nakedness of God, the raw power of transcendence, the immediacy of creation and the divine without any artificiality or interference. Francis goes naked without protection to gamble an experience of the divine that has been hidden and obscured in layer upon layer of mediations.

Our task at St. Bonaventure University, it seems to me, is to pose and provide the Franciscan imagination as a progressive, positive and optimistic alternative to the derisory secular imagination that has captured the marketplace today.

What Ferry says of Nietzche could apply to Francis, "He (Nietzche) seems to say that a successful life and a successful death are one and the same; we cannot live well unless we have vanquished all fear, and the way to attain that goal is to work on our lives, to render them so wise and so untouched by folly that we succeed in 'dying as little as possible.' In short, in order to live well one must be ready to die well, with no fears or regrets, and in order to die well one must have lived in such a way that only an infinitely small and inessential part of the self disappears."  Maybe one of the great differences between Francis and Nietzche may be in N's exorcism of folly. Francis did not seem to think that folly could or should be so easily dismissed.

The Feast of St Francis

Every Franciscan has a favorite image or story from the life of Francis. For me, it starts at the beginning, on the day that Francis is dragged before his father in the village square. His father is tired of his son giving away his hard earned money to the scum of the earth. He wants his money back. And Francis, fresh from his traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war, is tired of being the poster child of his father's fashion business. He is disgusted by a culture consumed by greed and violence. He wants out. He wants more.

And so, he strips naked, giving up once and for all the world of fashion. He stands naked before the world and before God. He stands naked to experience the raw power of the world, the deep intensity of relationship without filters, without impediments. He stands naked before the world and before God and he demands that God go naked before him. He wants the fullness of God without interference.

It is an incredible gamble, the gamble of a lifetime, the gamble of a generation.