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Posted by on Dec 31, 2009

New Year’s Greetings and Wishes

New Year’s Greetings and Wishes

New Year's Eve in Rio

New Year's Eve in Rio

It’s New Year’s Eve in Santa Cruz. A year has nearly ended and a new one is fast upon us. On top of that, the first decade of the new century is coming to a close. So much has happened in the past 10 years – for all of us. Some has been good. Some has been bad. Some has been just normal. That’s the way life goes.

Still, as Christians, we live with the belief and hope that God is in it all and brings good out of even the terrible times of our lives. The God who couldn’t bear to sit back in isolation from all of creation and from the human beings He created entered into our lives and history, to bring us all back into union again. It’s not up to us to become perfect and worthy of God. God became one of us and in doing so, made that re-union possible. We just have to let go of anger, jealously, hatred, fear, and all the other negative energies which we so easily hold onto and nurture. God will even help us let go of them.  It’s all a free gift!

So, at this time of a New Year and a New Decade, may the Love and Peace and Joy of God fill each of our hearts, so that no room remains for harboring the negative, life-draining spirits that lurk among us. May we look at each other and at ourselves and see the Face of God looking back at us. May we rejoice in the beauty of creation and of each person. May we trust that when the hard times come, as they certainly will, God will be with us personally, holding our hand and helping us through them. And may we move forward with confidence that we are loved and lovable, just as we are. Of course, there’s room for growth in love, patience, faithfulness, joy, and so forth, but we are each loved NOW, by our God who is absolutely crazy about us and just wants to hold us close in a huge, big hug.

What great good news that is!

Happy New Year.

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Posted by on Dec 24, 2009

Merry Christmas to All

Merry Christmas to All

Adorazione del Bambino - Fra Angelico

Adorazione del Bambino - Fra Angelico

Christmas is upon us here in Santa Cruz, California. It’s been a lovely, sunny day for Christmas Eve. Not hot, but not cold either. A fine day for a walk by the ocean. Tomorrow promises to be as lovely.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the great miracle that is life. I don’t do church work for a living. Randy and I work as consultants in the design of health care services and delivery of care, among other things.  One of my areas of expertise is translation of health care related materials into Spanish. These past couple of months, I’ve been working on a glossary of terms for a basic Biology textbook. It’s been absolutely fascinating.

Over 30 years ago, I graduated from Gonzaga University with undergraduate majors in Biology and Spanish. Through the years, I’ve combined the interests in a lot of ways, but I really haven’t had the chance to keep completely up to date with my knowledge of science. As a result, a lot of what I’m translating is new information for me. I’m spending a lot of time on the Internet, learning the new basics of Chemistry, Biology and Enviornmental Sciences so I can translate the definitions in a way that they will make sense in another language. I spend a lot of that time reading in Spanish, to find correct technical terms for things like “blebbing” and “Wobble base pairing of nucleotides,” as well as whether a particular metabolic pathway is generally called a “ruta” or a “vía.” As I said, it’s been a fascinating, though time consuming project.

So what does this have to do with theology and Christmas? The thing that keeps blowing my mind is that all that I see around me, all the people in my life, all the wonders of nature and of technology, all keep going because of simple positive and negative charges in atoms and the way those atoms interact with each other! Without those very fundamental chemical reactions, none of this, none of us, would even be, let alone be who and what we are. And yet, beyond the chemistry that underlies the biology, there is a spark of Divine life within each of us as humans. There is something that makes us different. While we can sometimes be as blind to other possiblities as the family cat who couldn’t figure out this morning that she could go around her perch to get up on it and eat her breakfast away from the neighbor cats, we do have the capacity to look at a challenging situation or something that is different than we expected and find new  and different solutions.  And we can think up new and better ways to do things, making life easier for all. We can choose to do great evil, but we can also choose to do great good. That spark of Divine life is a tremendous gift.

And then we come to Christmas. And at Christmas we remember that the Creator of all, the One who Is and Was and Ever Will Be, the One who loves all of creation into being and keeps us in existence with love, didn’t stop with being above it all and loving it into being. God chose to become one of us. And on top of that, God became a baby boy. A tiny, helpless child. All I can say is, Wow. We are truly blessed.

Merry Christmas to all. May this coming year be one of great joy and peace for you, through all the challenges you face, and may you know deeply the great love of our God who is Father/Parent, Son/Brother and Holy Spirit of Love.

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Posted by on Dec 14, 2009

An Advent Gift

An Advent Gift

Terry Hershey is one of my favorite columnists/bloggers. I look forward each week to his Sabbath Moment column. Today he offers this prayer. I suggest we all make it our own.

Our Prayer (and, Christmas gift suggestions)

Lord, in this Advent season, may we give
To our enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance.
To a friend, our heart.
To a customer, service.
To all, charity.
To every child, a good example.
To our self, respect.
Amen.

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Posted by on Dec 2, 2009

“Ready or Not, Here I Come!”

“Ready or Not, Here I Come!”

 

Advent Wreath

Advent Wreath

This past Sunday was the First Sunday of Advent – our New Year’s Day in the Church. I was visiting the parish in which I was raised, St. Patrick’s Parish in Spokane, WA. The homilist, Fr. Kenneth St. Hilaire, spoke of his experience on Thanksgiving Day with his family. His nieces organized a game of Hide and Go Seek. It’s a game we played many times in my family as children, and so had he.

In this game, one person is chosen to be “It” and everyone else runs and hides. The person who is “It” counts to 30, shouts, “Ready or not, here I come” and then tries to find the other ones who are hiding. When a person is found, he or she becomes the next “It” and the game continues. Sometimes the game goes on until all are found. Other times those found become “prisoners” of the one doing the seeking. In some versions, if a person who has not yet been found gets back to the base of the one who is “It”, all get to hide again and that original person continues to be “It”.

Fr. Kenny suggested that the spiritual life can be like this childhood game. Sometimes we even try to hide from the Lord – to pretend that maybe we won’t be found. But whatever we do, at some point in our lives, the Lord is going to say to us, “Ready or not, here I come.” Advent is a time to remember that and begin again to prepare our hearts and minds to meet the Lord – because He is coming, and when the time comes, we can’t say, “Just a minute, I’m not ready yet!”

So, whether the coming is our individual meeting with the Lord at the moment of our death, or the one at the end of time, Advent is a time to remember that the Kingdom is coming, the Lord is returning and the world as we know it will pass away.

Advent is a good time to make time for prayer, whether 2 minutes stolen from a busy day at work or 15 minutes of “walking prayer” or a Rosary offered at home or in church. Time spent remembering our Lord and King, speaking from our hearts to Him, then listening to His response will bring us closer to the Kingdom.

Another good thing to do in Advent is to look closely at our lives and see what is excess. What can be cut out to make room for something better? What can be shared with someone who is in need? It needn’t be something huge. But it’s pretty likely that most of us have something we can share or something that we don’t really need to be doing. Making space in our lives for the Lord’s coming brings a richness that material things cannot ever fill.

Finally, Fr. Kenny suggested that we look to Jesus’ mother, Mary, as a model and a helper in this great journey of Advent. She waited for his birth for 9 months. She prepared for the coming of her child. She raised him, loved him, cared for him and then stood by him as he entered into his adult ministry. At the cross, she stood and waited as he died. According to tradition, she was part of the community that welcomed him after the Resurrection and received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. As our “big sister” in faith, she can help us to get ready for the Lord’s coming.

So, this Advent season, I invite you to join me in this “game” of preparing for the Lord’s coming. When we hear, “Ready or not, here I come”, may we all be ready to be found by our great Lord and King.

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Posted by on Dec 1, 2009

Excavating Jesus: The Real Christ?

Excavating Jesus: The Real Christ?

excavatingjesus

John Dominic Crossan, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, is well known for his iconoclastic views on the historical Jesus. Excavating Jesus, written with archaeologist Jonathan Reed, is stimulating and challenging. Crossan’s argument that Jesus was a Galilean peasant who engendered a Kingdom movement after the murder of John the Baptist is compelling to me as an anthropologist, but it doesn’t seem to be the whole story.

The blending of archaeology and exegesis is intriguing. The use of ancient historical sources, such as Josephus and Pliny, and literature not included in the Bible, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, weaves a colorful and variegated tapestry. Is this the actual Jesus of history?

I’m not entirely convinced. To me it seems implausible that such a movement could arise from so unremarkable a prophet. The number of Jews killed by Rome for posing as popular leaders is very large. Why would one be singled out for such an inflation into the Word made flesh? If the Gospel stories are to be taken as parables or mythic metaphors about a deeper meaning, who created this literature and for what reason? If Christianity were created in this way, it would be a social and cultural process without parallel. Zoroaster (the Persian priest who founded Zoroastrianism), Sidartha Gauthama, (the founder of Bhuddism), and the Prophet Mohammed (the founder of Islam), are remarkable historical figures – but none of them according to their followers claimed to be God.

If somehow the peasant founder or spokesman for a resistance or “terrorist” movement is magnified by his followers, why would devout Jews be so blasphemous as to make him into the messiah and a god? Somewhere there is a missing link between this peasant of history and the Christ of history.

It is very curious how Crossan holds the Gospel accounts up to the measure of Josephus’s history. Crossan then compares the claims of other contemporary religions as part of a general magical mentality. Somehow, Josephus could write from an historical perspective of relating true events but the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus are to be seen as parable and allegory? That isn’t to say that various oral and written sources weren’t involved in the development of the Gospel accounts. In fact Crossan goes to some effort to stress that the early Christian community took them to be true and those involved in their composition believed in their veracity.

All in all, there is still a core of speculation in this fascinating book. It is an attempt to put many puzzle pieces together. It seems, though, that the Jesus he finds would not be capable of inspiring a Jesus movement that would grow into Christianity. In many respects, Crossan’s Jesus of history could inspire a movement, but it does not seem plausible that it would endure, let alone become a world religion.

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