Walkin’ on the Water: 19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

1 Kgs 19:9a, 11-13a

Ps 85

Rom 9:1-5

Mt 14:22-33

 

"Lord let us see your kindness and grant us your salvation."

 

Psalm 85 brings the two readings and the Gospel together.  Each reading is about faith fraying along the edges or faith that seemed to be lost.  Each of the speakers:  Elijah, Paul, and Peter could have easily uttered the psalm response

from his position of desperation, discouragement, or fear.  We can identify with those feelings and add a few of our own. 

 

Things can't be worse for Elijah.  He fled to escape the wrath of the evil Jezebel

who wanted him dead.  While in hiding an angel instructed him to eat and prepare for a journey.  All Elijah wanted was to die.  He was despondent and had lost hope.  His faith was shaky.  He ate only because the angel demanded that he do so.  Then, he began a journey of forty days. 

 

The Jewish Study Bible notes that when unencumbered and alone a man could walk between 15 and 25 miles per day Multiplied by 40 days, Elijah walked between 600 and 1000 miles.  To put the distances into perspective, it is about 500 miles south from Boston to Washington, DC and 1000 miles west to Chicago. 

 

What went through his mind during that arduous trek? What goes through our minds during the 40-day journeys we are forced to take during life, the journeys of chemotherapy, chronic pain, or the seemingly endless journey of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's?

 

Elijah's encounter with God in a whisper rather than an earth-shaking event is one of the remarkable images in the Old Testament.  Elijah had to be open and willing to hear that whisper.  He had to be attuned to and ready for it.  Similarly, we have to be prepared and willing to hear the voice of God in a whisper, in the brief moment of quiet that interrupts the background noise that complicates our lives. 

 

Paul’s discouragement that his people rejected Jesus is palpable.  His distress was such that he would have been willing to have himself cut off from Christ

if they would accept the great gift of salvation. We all know Paul’s frustration. 

We know the pain when no one will listen to us.  We know the frustration of being met with opposition by everyone in our lives: family, friends, co-workers and so on.  We know that feeling of radical loneliness  when we plead: "Lord let me see you kindness and grant me your salvation." 

Today’s Gospel take place immediately after Jesus fed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes.  The crowd had dispersed.  He dismissed his disciples and went up the mountain alone to pray.  Something important happens here, something we fail to notice much of the time. Pope Benedict XVI wrote that we know from the Gospels that Jesus frequently spent nights alone in prayer and  conversation with His Father.  He suggests that Jesus’ speech, preaching and ministry grew out of that silence and matured within the accompanying solitude.

 

While Jesus was praying the apostles were crossing the 4 1/2 mile wide Sea of Galilee.  They were a few miles off-shore and in no position to swim if the boat capsized.  It was very late.  The fourth watch of the night was between 3:00 and 6:00 AM.  Thus they had been struggling to cross--and Jesus had been in prayer--for hours. 

 

We can identify with their terror when they saw Jesus walking on the water toward them. And then, as we heard,  Peter acted. when he ”got out of the boat

and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.”  But his faith wavered when he saw how strong the wind was.” Fear replaced faith. This brings up the difficult question, “What is faith.”

 

Australian Trappist Fr. Michael Casey makes an important point:  “Faith has to grapple constantly with the doubts we may experience when we hear the words of the poet Robert Browning  God is in his heaven—all’s right with the world.'  So often it doesn’t seem that way.”  Many times in our lives it doesn’t seem, or didn’t seem, that God is in his heaven or that anything is right with the world. 

 

Casey goes on to define faith:  “Faith means letting go of our ambition to control, understand, or even cope with what happens. Faith means releasing our anxieties into God’s hands and seeing all that happens as coming from the hand of God. The fact that I cannot comprehend the logic of events means simply that my intellect is limited.  Our relationship with God is often undermined by fears about impending disaster”

 

It is terrifying to be wheeled into an operating room.  It is panic-inducing to hear a diagnosis of cancer. No one can describe the emotions upon the death of one’s child.  Our faith wavers and, like Peter, we begin to sink.  Our faith may waver

when we realize the seriousness of our situation.  We may suddenly doubt

as the river rises above flood stage in our lives. 

 

Faith does not mean that life will go smoothly.  Faith is not a shield against trauma. Faith does not protect us from pain nor is it a Berlin wall against

the anguish of grief. Faith is an umbrella over us during these crises. 

Peter’s faith was strong when he jumped out of the boat because he wasn't thinking about it too much. 

When he began to intellectualize and pay attention to the storm he tried to take control.  For the moment his faith vanished.  And then he prayed; “Lord.  Save me!”  We also try walk on the waters of a stormy lake at night. In those moments

we can only plead as did the psalmist:

 

"Lord let us see you kindness and grant us your salvation."

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 Photos are from Gerroa, NSW, Australia, specifically along Seven Mile Beach.  We spent the first ten days of tertianship there getting to know eah other.  Glorious time.  

 

 

Shells nestled in a rock

The Beach on a Sunday morning.  It emptied out before the heat of the day and then filled again later.  And this was during the Australian winter.

Beach Scene.

Shells piled on the beach.

 Fr. Jack, SJ, MD

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memorial of Edith Stein

In a coordinated act of resistance by the Dutch bishops, a pastoral letter that condemned the deportation of the Jews was read from every Catholic pulpit in the Netherlands, on Sunday, July 26, 1942  Nazi retribution was psychopathic, swift, and lethal.  A round-up that targeted converts from Judaism to Catholicism was enacted on August 2^nd.  Edith Stein, known in religion as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and her blood sister Rosa, a laywoman who also converted,  were taken from Carmel that day, as were all non-Aryan members of every Dutch religious community. When the train transporting her stopped near the Dominican Convent in Speyer, Germany a place where she had taught before entering Carmel Stein was able to send a message to the sisters that read, “Greetings from Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  We are heading East.” She disembarked the train on August 6, 1942 after a long uncomfortable trip. Brushing the dust from her habit she straightened the veil as best she could.  Unlike some of the passengers, she knew the dust on her clothing wasn't going to matter for long.  Born on October 12, 1891 in Breslau, Poland she was back in the country of her birth.  But, the sign on the train station read Oświęcim, Auschwitz in the English-speaking world.

 

The youngest of eleven children born into an observant Jewish family her academic brilliance was obvious at a young age. She declared herself to be an atheist at 14. 

Reflecting back on that troubled period she wrote, "I consciously and deliberately stopped praying so as to rely exclusively on myself; so as to make all decisions about my life in freedom."  It would take almost seventeen years for her to discover true freedom. 

 

She received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Frieburg, under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, writing a dissertation titled, On Empathy.  Two episodes during her student years moved her from the illusory freedom of atheistic self-dependence to the radical freedom possible only to those who live under the mystery and shadow of the Cross.

 

The first occurred when she visited the widow of a classmate killed in WW I. Though bereaved, the young widow's faith was such that she was consoling those who had come to console her. That example left a deep mark on Stein  who wrote:  "It was my first encounter with the cross and the divine power it bestows on those who carry it. For the first time I saw with my own eyes the Church born from its redeemer's sufferings

triumphant over the sting of death. That was the moment my unbelief collapsed and Christ shone forth---in the mystery of the Cross."

 

During the summer of 1921, she was browsing through the library of friends and stumbled upon the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Upon finishing it she said, "This is the truth." She was baptized on New Year's Day 1922, age 31.  Stein entered Carmel in Cologne in 1933.

 

As the Nazi persecution of Jews increased in intensity she was moved to Echt, Holland in 1938 where she wrote her last work. titled The Science of the Cross. Despite knowing her fate Stein dismissed plans to move her to England explaining, "Do not do it.  Why should I be spared?  Is it not right that I should gain no advantage from my Baptism? If I cannot share the lot of my brothers and sisters; my life, in a certain sense, is destroyed." 

She ascended Calvary in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on 9 August 1942,just thirteen days after Dutch Carmelite Priest, St. Titus Brandsma was murdered by lethal injection in Dachau.

 

Stein left an enormous amount of writing behind.  Her letters are the most accessible. Released from the self-imposed shackles of atheistic pseudo-freedom she found radical freedom in the science and shadow of the cross.

 

St. John Paul, II, quoted her in his homily at the canonization Mass: "Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth!"

 

St. Edith Stein, pray for us.

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I've had a long time devotion to Edith Stein who accounts in part for my vocation to the Society and was also part of my master's thesis on healing miracles.  The healing of two-year old Benedicta McCarthy, who was named after the saint whose parents, Melkite Rite Priest Charles McCarthy and his wife, had a long-standing devotion to her.  The McCarthy's were from Brockton, MA.  It quite a story.  

The photos are from the church at Sevenhill Retreat House in Sevenhill, South Australia.  We made our tertian long retreat.  

Cross prepared for adoration on Good Friday.  We departed on Palm Sunday to return to Sydney.

The Church at Sevenhill was simple but lovely.   

Fr. Jack, SJ, MD

Listen to Him: Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration

 

Dan 7:9-10, 13-14

Ps 97:1-2, 5-6,99

2 Pt 1:16-19

Mt 17:1-9

 

The Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, draws us into a mystery that is well beyond our understanding. The Transfiguration represents the fulfillment of the prophecy we heard in the reading from Daniel that tried to describe something

that cannot be fully captured in words.

 

"The Son of Man received dominion, glory, and kingship; all peoples, nations, and languages serve him. His dominion is everlasting; his kingship shall not be destroyed."  The reading prefigured this Feast  on which we recall Jesus appearing transfigured in brilliant glory; speaking with Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets in the presence of three of His apostles.

 

Imagine the setting: Dazzling light flooding the scene as Moses, Elijah, and Jesus conversed. What were they saying? What did they sound like?  Place yourself with the apostles on the mountain. The tension increases to the point of becoming unbearable.  And then you hear God's voice: “This is my beloved Son,

with whom I am well pleased,"

 

The Father confirms that Jesus is the Christ, the Beloved Son of God, whom Peter confessed him to be in the previous chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. And then the Father gives you a mission through the command to the apostles: "Listen to him." 

 

Like the apostles, you are stunned into silence and overcome with awe.  Jesus the Nazorean and teacher, son of Mary and wonder worker, Jesus, the carpenter, healer, and the prophet who was given no honor in his native place, is fully revealed in his Divinity. 

 

But today we commemorate another transfiguration.  We recall another revelation.

 

It too was marked by a blinding light. 

 

It too was overshadowed by a cloud.

 

It too brought caused prostration in fear and trembling. 

 

It too was marked by stunned silence. 

 

 

On August 6 the Church recalls that Jesus was revealed in his Divinity on a mountain. 

 

On August 6 history recalls that the human race was revealed in its depravity at Hiroshima in 1945. 

 

The world would never be the same.  Hiroshima captured in one event the sum total of human sinfulness since the fall of Adam and Eve.  The events of Hiroshima, and three days later, Nagasaki, compressed the cumulative horrors

of all the wars of the past centuries, into a single and singular event.  This time God did not give mankind a mission from the cloud.  There was a terrible silence.

There was a void. 

 

Or was there?

           

The voice of God was obscured by the explosion.  It was not silenced. 

 

More than 2000 years since the ancient Book of Daniel came into being, 2000 years since Jesus' incarnation, birth, passion, death, resurrection and ascension,

and seventy-eight years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, God's mandate: “listen to Him” is as compelling and urgent as it was for the shaken apostles.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated man's capability for destruction on an unimaginable scale, a scale that is unique to our present time and technology.

 

"This is my Son; listen to him.”     

 

As we listen to Jesus, as we take His teaching to heart and allow that teaching to transform us, we move a bit closer to the eschatological glory of  the transfigured Jesus. At the same time we move just a bit farther from the apocalyptic destruction of the nuclear bombs, we take a step away from the genocides

in Armenia, Rwanda and Burundi, we increase our distance ever so slightly

from the ongoing horror of the war in Ukraine, and other atrocities inflicted throughout the world.

 

If we allow Jesus’ teaching to transform us, we move further from the not-too-long-ago agonies of the Baltic States and the unmitigated horror of China's Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution. If we heed God's mandate to listen to his beloved Son, we can begin mover closer to healing from the systematic attacks being waged in the U.S. today, the attacks on morality, vulnerable human life at both ends of the spectrum, and most recently, on confused pre-pubertal children.

 

"The mountains melt like wax before the LORD,

before the LORD of all the earth.
The heavens proclaim his justice,
and all peoples see his glory."

 

"The Lord is king, the Most High over all the earth."

 

"This is my beloved Son, listen to Him."

 

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I've always loved the Feast of the Transfiguration.  It has become even more meaningful since I began doing some work at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration, the only Carthusian house in North America.  Over the years have taken multiple photos.  Three are below. 

 

A very large canvas of The Transfiguration at the Charterhouse. 

The Caarthusian Seal on the plate glass of the small museum at the summit of Mt. Equinox.  The clouds were being reflected from the sky on the kind of perfect summer day that makes life wonderful.

Was asked to do some shooting during Mass on one occasion.

 Fr. Jack, SJ, MD