Vulnerability and Prayerful Discernment

Reading today’s Gospel, I felt uncomfortable. I find that a feeling of discomfort around something I come across in Scripture or in life usually points to something bigger that I should start paying attention to.

I felt uncomfortable because I identified with the “man full of leprosy,” this incredibly vulnerable person whom Jewish society rejected and deemed necessarily sinful by virtue of his physical state, an apparently humble person who threw himself down on the ground when Jesus approached, pleading with him to make him “clean.” When push comes to shove, I don’t like to think of myself as vulnerable, nor does the idea of being unclean necessarily appeal to me. Quite to the contrary, I would rather think of myself as perfectly capable of dealing with whatever comes my way, and like most people, I would imagine, I like to think of myself as a good person, not any more sinful or unclean than the next person. But here it is, just the same—that discomfort, that reminder that just like the leper in the story, I am filled with vulnerability and in need of Jesus’ healing.

And I felt uncomfortable because I identified with Jesus, too. I like to think of Jesus as the ideal person, in some ways, an example I’d like to emulate. Today’s reading made me realize that I have come to make an idol of busy-ness, of doing, that my expectation of Jesus was to bustle about, healing every ailing and vulnerable person he came across. Yet his example convicted me, helped me realize that I don’t want to take the time to “withdraw to deserted places to pray” as Jesus did. I’d much rather busy myself with the good work to which I feel called, but, in reality, discernment is ongoing. With the end of my MDiv now in sight, I need to be right in the thick of that prayerful discernment in the months ahead.

Moving forward into the day, to what vulnerabilities does this Gospel reading call your attention? To which deserted places are you being encouraged to withdraw and pray?

Jen Owens took the above photo on her first full day in Belize City, Belize, around this time last year, when she accompanied two University Ministry staff members and ten Marquette students on a service and immersion trip there. Jen still wears the solidarity ring that Fr. Dick Perl, SJ, gave her and the other participants, because it makes her feel just a little bit uncomfortable.

Baptizing With the Water of Good Works

When I read the readings for today, I encountered memories that remind me of why I continue to call myself Catholic. When my brothers and sister and I were growing up, my mom decorated the house in Advent and Christmas colors—the branches of the tree were beautiful, glowing with purple, pink, gold, and white, and angels adorned the walls of our home. Back then, I was almost embarrassed by it, envious of friends’ houses that celebrated a more mainstream Christmas, with the characteristic reds and greens and Santas and Rudolphs. But as time has gone on, I’ve become more grateful for what my mom taught us, in big ways and small ones, about claiming this faith as our own.

There were the everyday things that she taught us were important. That we should always include everyone on the playground, that it’s not fair to leave classmates out of our games. It was how we learned to live the idea that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon [us],” as we hear in the First Reading. And this extended to the way in which we were to treat strangers, especially the poor. To the point that we eventually started a program feeding the homeless in a park near our parish, sharing lunches prepared in the kitchens of our family and our friends with our neighbors who struggled to make ends meet. It was how we learned to live the idea that we were “sent to bring glad tidings to the poor.”

In my mom’s faith we never saw the kind of polarization that seems to characterize the contemporary Catholic Church in the United States. She “prayed without ceasing,” a daily Mass attendee, and she worked among the “lowly,” treating them with the kind of dignity and respect that should be afforded all people. And through her example, she taught us that these actions, though hardly unique to Catholicism, put us in the lineage of John the Baptist, baptizing with the water of good works, “making straight the way of the Lord” during this Advent season.

Keeping Watch, Becoming Witnesses to Life: Ita, Maura, Dorothy, and Jean

Jen will deliver this homiletic reflection in Andover Chapel this Wednesday, 3 December, for this week's Noon Service at Harvard Divinity School .

To begin, I’d like to read an excerpt from what would be the last letter that Maryknoll sister Ita Ford would write, with her characteristic lightheartedness, from Chaletenango, in El Salvador, to her mother in New York, dated 1 December 1980.
“Dear Mom,
I guess we’re into celebrating life—birth, birthdays, and my own grudging acknowledgement that I’m still alive for some reason. So here’s to three generations of Fords thankful for the gift of life!” (from Jeanne Evans' "Here I Am, Lord": The Letters and Writings of Ita Ford, 247)
In a place that had become so influenced by death and destruction, Ita Ford became a witness to life. And I think this witness has something to do with our readings as we begin this season of Advent.

We remember Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan because of the witness to life that they offered. Before coming to El Salvador, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Maryknoll sisters, had lived for many years as missionaries in Nicaragua and Chile. Jean Donovan, a lay missioner who was 27 at the time of her death, had left a business career and an engagement in Connecticut for work among the poor in El Salvador. Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, had been in El Salvador the longest of the four. As the work of God’s hands, they committed themselves to work alongside the most vulnerable among us. In the face of death, these women became witnesses to life.

These four women lived in the midst of the beginnings of the Salvadoran civil war, which was supported in large part by the US American government and lasted until 1992. This largely was a war against the poor, who made up the vast majority of the Salvadoran population. Influenced by the hope of liberation theology, the poor had begun to organize for their rights, and they faced violent opposition from those in power as a result. In the face of death, they became witnesses to life.

Ita, Maura, Dorothy and Jean kept watch and read the signs of the times in El Salvador. They worked among refugees fleeing political persecution and economic poverty. They provided sanctuary for priests who had been organizing against oppressive governments. They offered pastoral care to catechists who lived in fear of the work of the military in the midst of the civil war. And twenty-seven-year-old Jean often baked cookies for Archbishop Oscar Romero on the days that he delivered his famous homilies broadcast over Salvadoran radio. In the face of death, these women became witnesses to life.

On their way home from the airport on December 2nd, 1980, Salvadoran soldiers in civilian clothes stopped the jeep in which they were riding. Two of them were raped, and the four of them were “shot in the head at close range” (from Robert Ellsberg's All Saints, 526).

In the face of death, these women became witnesses to life. As we begin this season of Advent, we reflect on what this witness might mean in light of our readings. In the first reading, we hear of a God who is a loving parent, that “we are the clay and you the potter; we are all the work of your hands.” If we really believe in a God who is a loving parent, that we are shaped by God’s hands, we will respond in a way that reflects the example of Ita, Maura, Dorothy, and Jean. These four women understood what it means to live and what it means to love. They knew God intimately and demonstrated with the commitment of their lives that they were the work of God’s hands. They loved the people of El Salvador in the most real way that they could, one that did not allow for injustice to be perpetuated against them. Let us have the strength to watch, as Jesus encourages us in the Gospel, for those threats to life in our midst. Let us work together in service, to struggle toward justice, building up the Kingdom of God, living each day in a way that shows we are the work of God’s hands.

"What Love Looks Like in Public": 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reflecting on this week's readings, I am reminded of my first tour of the LA Catholic Worker community--the spirit of welcome that they shared, the look of the smoggy skyline from the top floors of the house, the delight they took at sharing bits of the house's story, and the photos on the walls of prophets like Dorothy Day, César Chávez, and Dan Berrigan, SJ, whose lives I had only read about. That wall of pictures had a way of making me feel like the stories were still going on, that the community carried them forward, that others would continue to do so in the days ahead.

The liturgy interwove the stories that the pictures told with those of the wider Catholic community. The presiders added to them, reflecting the diversity of those who gathered there. Whether a priest led our celebration or a layperson did, a man or a woman, celibate or not, they all communicated their passion for the Gospel with humility and sincerity. The homily was infused with the fruits of the Bible study in which the community members had participated that week; everyone had the opportunity to reflect on the Gospel after it was proclaimed. The kiss of peace lasted as long as it needed to, not complete until you had hugged or helloed everyone in the room.

Maybe it was because members of the community made the Eucharist that I remembered that most people came to the Catholic Worker literally to be fed, that no one is turned away. Maybe it was because the people there, in their brokenness, had in their hearts the radical kind of love to which Jesus calls us this week, that I felt there was room for the rest of us, too. Maybe it was because they put that love into action, in a very public way, that I was reminded of the meaning of justice. The soup that would later be served on Skid Row was blessed at the end of the communion meal, and I reflected on the cost of the kind of discipleship these women and men practiced. One of the community members played at his guitar, and we sang:

I have decided to follow Jesus.

I have decided to follow Jesus.

I have decided to follow Jesus.

No turnin' back.

No turnin' back.

The quote in the title of today's post is attributed to Cornel West, in his definition of justice.

Image Credit: Christ in the Breadlines by Catholic Worker artist Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990).

Las Casas and the Law of Love

I've spent the last week immersed in the Confesario, an instruction that Bartolome' de las Casas wrote c. 1547 instructing the confessors in his bishopric in the way to handle confession of conquistadores, encomenderos, and merchants involved in the arms trade that fed the Conquest. Based on a radical understanding of Jesus' law of love, las Casas calls on his confessors to grant absolution to such individuals if they are willing to free the indigenous slaves in their charge, allegedly for instruction in the faith. Not only must they free these people (and he does recognize their humanity and their agency, as many of his contemporaries did not), but they must also go to the communities from these indigenous people came to make restitution. In doing so, he is attempting to abolish the system of encomienda and the abuses that accompanied it, enforcing the New Laws that the church and the Crown had begun to overturn. Essentially, he and the confessors that follow his instruction are committing acts of civil and ecclesial disobedience in the interest of following the greater Law of Love.

Part of what is so compelling to me about his example is his understanding of love, in the private and public sense. His writings suggest that love of neighbor is deeper than simple kindness to her; it wants all that is best for her in the broadest sense. True love necessitates justice. And if that justice is not found, work for justice follows. It's a logic that defies the way we think about the church and the world and the false boundaries we often draw between them.

To what kind of love are we called today? To what kind of justice does that love push us to understand and to enact? Of what kind of change are we to be prophets in contemporary church and society? These are the kinds of questions this research raises for me, the kind I hope to discuss as work on this project moves forward.

En paz y esperanza,

Jen