My namesake

Most years, the gospel for the 2nd Sunday of Easter features my patron saint. My mom made sure I always knew I'd been named for "doubting Thomas," and it's true that I've followed his example a bit more than I'd like to admit.

But I've also had a lot of opportunity to reflect on my patron. His dubiousness toward his peers' reports of Jesus' resurrection isn't his only unique mention in Scripture, and I can't help but believe that an earlier story provides a helpful insight into Thomas' skepticism.

Not long before, Jesus was readying his followers to return to Bethany, so he could raise his friend Lazarus from the dead. The disciples objected, reminding Jesus that "they'd" tried to stone him the last time he was near Jerusalem. Yet once Jesus made his determination clear, it was Thomas who seemed to rally the other apostles: "Let's go die with him." Yet subsequent events revealed that this may have been mostly mere bravado. When Jesus was arrested, the apostles abandoned him. It must have been humiliating for all of them to consider, but especially for Thomas and Peter, who'd both so clearly declared their willingness to die with the Lord.

So I believe it was a totally crushed man who first received his friends' remarkable news of this miraculous event - which they'd witnessed for themselves but he had not, and in which he could not dare invest his hope. Our greatest personal devastation comes when we know we've failed those we love; it is multiplied beyond bearing when we've done so after foolhardily declaring our intention to stand firm, and in plain view. "Even if Jesus were somehow alive, surely he wouldn't still want anything to do with me . . . ," he might have thought. That Jesus would have appeared to the rest of them in his absence might have further confirmed this thinking. Better to disbelieve them than further consider the implications if it were true.

When we think we've committed ourselves completely to someone we love, only to fall so pitifully short - and in the clear sight of everyone we respect - it takes something truly remarkable to restore us. But once that happens, we are stronger and more whole than we were before.

Only a personal, undeniable encounter with the risen Christ could restore Thomas to himself. I think that's often the only way we can be restored, too. Few of us today have a physical encounter with our risen Savior, but He still reveals Himself to us through the Holy Spirit. He will do so, if we ask Him to. He is always willing to meet us where we are, if we're only willing to be open to Him when He does.

Love is a choice

"I'm sorry I've been such a pain these last few days," she said, after we'd both climbed into bed and kissed good night. Yes, she'd been pretty irritable, and until earlier in the evening I'd thought she was mad at me over how busy I was. Holy Week is always insane for me, and this year had been unusual in that the week before had been no less hectic. Still, I'd made a sincere effort to be more present and helpful during the time I was home, and had to fight off my own pique over my contributions not being more appreciated. It wasn't much of an effort, but still one that I found I had to make consciously.

"That's okay," I responded gently, "it just gave me a chance to choose to love you." In fact, I had just journaled about something like this in the wee hours of the morning.

She didn't understand what I meant, and asked me to clarify.

"Well, usually it's easy to love you. But I'm not only supposed to love you when it's easy; I'm supposed to keep loving you when it doesn't come so naturally, too," I explained, concluding, "And I was really glad to."

"You always know what to say," she answered, clearly pleased and also lightly teasing.

But the thing is, it wasn't so much a matter of saying the right thing as of really having experienced this dimension of love, which we seem to miss so often. It's as if we've become largely incapable of loving with anything except our emotions. But I'm convinced it's the way that we love when we don't especially feel like it that actually paves the way for those loving emotions to become more consistent within us.

Holy Thursday/Good Friday adoration

Every year I watch during one of the wee hours of our open adoration between the Mass of the Lord's Supper and morning prayer on Good Friday. Every time it is one of my favorite hours of the entire year. Here are the first of my notes from this hour:

I feel very distant from my bride.

My Bridegroom would seem to have me know that, while her distance is not His desire, it is yet His gift to me. It is but the smallest taste of the separation He feels for His beloved, the bitter truth that marked His agony. The burden of our sin could not help but be accompanied with the sadness of knowing that so many whose sins He carried with Him to Calvary would yet reject Him, even resent Him, though He did nothing that was not the Father's will. Yet rather than react to the hurt of our rejection by rejecting us in return, our deareast Jesus responds by embracing us in love - indeed, in the greatest love there can be, laying down His life for us - even though it causes Him so much more pain before it can bring forth the joy of our deliverance into Him.

Still today He tastes the unspeakably bitter gall of our separation from Him. "If we are the Body," then we are part tongue, and we must taste it, too, and yet respond as does our Head: always with the sweet embrace of self-sacrificing love.

Deliverance from slavery, death

I mentioned in prayer the other day that our path from Egypt to the promised land, that is, from our slavery to sin to our joy and freedom in Christ, is the way of the cross. Of course, we understand that Christ's sacrifice was the price for our deliverance, that He is our water and manna in the desert (symbols that had far greater meaning to those who lived in that environment in a far more technologically primitive time than ours), that he is our way into the loving kingdom of God the Father.

Yet what was foremost in my mind is more along the lines of my last post. It isn't that we must purchase our own deliverance and freedom by sacrificing ourselves as Christ did. Rather, if we have truly received this wondrous gift, one of the ways we will share it with others is to love as Christ did, with self-sacrificial abandon.

"As the Father has sent me, so I send you."

The more we love in this way, the more we will discover ourselves living in the freedom of Christ's love rather than our former self-centered slavery and death.

Crazy love

I "know" a guy who titles his every blog post with a song title. I'm not copying you, Tom, honest!

After an extraordinary amount of time and number of opportunities to reflect on this during this Lenten season, and I can't escape the feeling that we usually miss the essential way in which we are to be united with Christ in the Passion. We talk about joining the difficulties that we face with his suffering, think of them as our crosses to bear, and that is a good thing. But thus limiting our view of our own crosses misses something truly essential about the Passion, something easily overlooked and more easily dismissed. In fact, suggesting that this aspect should be central to the truly Christian life may seem needlessly masochistic. It will remind some of ways in which the Gospel has been misused throughout history to keep others under control. I'm certainly not suggesting its application in any such way; I'd never use this to suggest how another should respond to me.

Still, once we've truly turned away from the sin in our lives, I've come to believe that our failure to recognize and embrace this one, small yet obvious element of the Way of the Cross is the biggest obstacle to our being Christ to the world. I believe it represents each Christian's calling, and in fact should be our greatest aspiration. Yet failing to live out this facet of the gospel can also be the greatest obstacle to our becoming the completely free people who God dreams for us to become in Him. We never fail to marvel at its wonder when we see it put into practice, as we're blessed to do occasionally. Yet it is only possible to the extent to which we have been open to the Holy Spirit's transformation.

For the way of the cross ultimately consists in this: to receive unspeakable, completely undeserved hurt, and respond with utterly unmerited, compassionate love.

It sounds insane, doesn't it? Call it "God's crazy love," if you will.

I think there are many reasons we fail to follow Christ's example in this; among them:
- The most obvious is our sense of self-preservation, by which we protect ourselves from further hurt
- If we at all believe (consciously or not) that we've contributed to the situation in which we've been hurt, our defensiveness interferes with our ability to love
- Most fundamentally, we don't really consider ourselves responsible for Christ's crucifixion; in fact, our psychobabble culture tells us that such a viewpoint is self-denigrating. Therefore, we are not converted to the degree that is only possible by acknowledging our need of him

I'm blessed to have been loved like this, both by Christ and by others. I pray that I may respond to each hurt done to me in the same way.

Cutie

Our two-and-a-half year old granddaughter is about as into understanding relationships as I've ever seen a child of her age be. Having figured out that most people go by more than one title, she seems to be continually unraveling how they all fit together. When I walk in the front door at the end of the work day before she has gone home, I'm greeted with a excited gasp and an enthusiastic "PĂPAW!" This of course makes my day, along her little brother not being far behind with a great big grin and his arms up for a hug.

But it's what our granddaughter says next that is new to me. She points to her grandma and asks, "You call her . . . ?" filling in her name. Then she looks at grandma, "You call him . . . ?" Sometimes she'll then carry on with "Daddy calls mommy . . . " and "Mommy calls daddy . . . ," filling in each of our names. Then this morning, when grandma went to get her, she said, "Mommy calls you 'Mom'?"

I doubt the written words convey how cute she is with this. And I don't necessarily think she's a little genius because of it, though we've always thought that she's really bright, and that mommy & daddy are going to have their hands full! But I'm just fascinated by how each child's development is different, and how each is a uniquely precious gift.

More in the same vein

Yesterday's gospel reading was the raising of Lazarus. There's much to discuss in it, and here are some really good thoughts from our associate pastor. I was struck by something else about it; I'm sure its seeds were planted elsewhere, and it is also related to my last post. I found these thoughts then echoed by our pastor, as well - I love getting two good homilies on the same set of readings - though perhaps not in this much detail:

When Lazarus came out of the tomb, Jesus commanded those nearby to unbind him, as he was still wrapped in his burial cloths.

At first glance, this might not seem to bear much in common with the nostalgia shown by the children of Israel following their delivery from slavery. The analogy of being delivered from death and from slavery to sin is pretty obvious, but what does this have to do with Lazarus burial cloths?

Recall how the Israelites continually grumbled against God in the desert, often because they feared for their basic survival needs. Rather than ask God to provide for their needs, they longed for a return to their slavery. After all, their old lives had at least provided for their basic needs of food, drink, and shelter.

Lazarus' death and the Israelites' slavery are both metaphors for our sinfulness, which God has delivered us from through Christ, the Resurrection and the Life. In abundant and incomparably costly compassion, God has delivered me from death, from being dead to or enslaved in sin. Considering the depth of my sin, it is no less a wonder, really, than the wondrous delivery of the Israelites or the raising of Lazarus. Each of us has been set free from the slavery and death of sin.

So why do we still cling to our grave clothes?

Even after accepting Christ's sacrifice on our behalf, we often continue to embrace parts of our life - our "old" life - that we know, deep in our hearts somewhere, are not God's will for us. If we were to be honest with ourselves, we'd likely grant that these flaws to which we cling generally fall among the capital vices, which pretty much cover all the bases. Some of these are things which we consider minor, unimportant habits or attachments. We consider others deeply central to ourselves. In both cases, we rarely think of them as obstacles to God, or consider asking God to help us part with them.

These are our grave clothes, and if we're fortunate enough to be surrounded by those who've witnessed the miracle of our rising, still we resist their attempts to remove these trappings of death from us. We too often cling to them. They are the call of Egypt, beckoning us to remain enslaved. These things become that which keeps us from growing into the abundant life God dreams for us to embrace in its fullness.

As I've mentioned before, I think this is usually for lack of trust in God. We still think God wants to limit our fun. Or, we're so enamored with who we are that don't fully believe in the person God dreams for us to become. We fail to believe that God's plan for us is really all that much better than what we must surrender - our slavery, our grave clothes - to be fully transformed in Him.

In the words of a long-ago desperate father, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!"

Learning from others' mistakes

I find myself reflecting on the Israelites in the desert. They'd labored under terrible oppression for four hundred years. Finally their lives had become so bitter and the deliverance so complete that they dared to leave the enslaved life they'd come to know. Then they found themselves delivered from certain death at the hands of Pharoah's army, into a desert which presented them with challenge after challenge. No water. No food. Seraph serpents. Against each of these, they grumbled. Not merely praying for an answer, they grumbled against Moses and against God, not believing that the One who'd delivered them from slavery so wondrously would provide for their needs. They formed a calf to worship while Moses was on the Mount Sinai, and generally acted as if they didn't really believe in God at all, despite all they'd seen. When the abundant fruit of the promised land was brought before them, the scouts brought along with it their pessimistic report of the likelihood of God delivering them into this land of plenty.

So, basically, the children of Israel proved over and over again that they trusted only in their ability to provide for themselves.

We're not so different from them. We may not ever melt down gold to make an idol to worship, but we cling to plenty of things that are clearly not God's will for us. And we're probably even more likely than our long-ago forebears to trust only in the portion of the road we can see, and our own ability to move ourselves along it. So when we get to a choice between the "blind faith" we so disdain and the wrongful act that we can see will yield at least a short term gain or pleasure, we choose the latter. "God helps those who help themselves," we insist counter-scripturally, rationalizing the self-centered choices by which we advance ourselves - professionally, economically, intellectually, physically, emotionally, spiritually - at our brothers' expense.

We seem to have lost the ability to trust that if we do the right thing, loving God and our neighbor, God will be faithful to ensure that all is ultimately well.

I think this is partly because we insist on seeing this world only in its own context. Matthew Kelly would say we've lost sight of our essential purpose. Tarek Saab (the Catholic speaker, not the Arab-Venezuelan politician) would remind us that if we would live rightly, we must never lose sight of our death and desired destination.

God has delivered us from our slavery to sin, but we only want to leave the parts that we deem as really bitter. The "not-so-bad" parts? Well, we think we'd just as soon hang onto them for a while or, having given them up, we continue to pine for them.

The land ahead is filled with abundant life! Will we not hunger to become the person God dreams for us to be, and thereby enter it?

When things come together

So I've been having this wonderful Lent: prayerful, uplifting, transforming. It's been a wonderful confluence of unmerited favor, a combination of the opportunity to prayerfully reflect on the Way of the Cross each week along with the grace to pray and read reflectively each morning, even when I haven't especially felt like doing so or have wanted to go in another direction with my attention.

Then, last weekend, I hit a bit of a roadblock, a glitch in a relationship that immediately evoked my former tendencies to put all of my attention on myself and what I wanted. That's actually a far more complex thing, and I don't want to get into the details of it right now.

But a funny thing happened to me this time. Instead of just hardening my heart so as to go my own stubborn way, I found the grace and mercy - not within me toward another, but toward me from God - to keep on track. I persevered in daily prayer and reflection, embracing and trusting what I believe to be God's desire for me rather than my former self-centeredness. And, lo and behold, an opportunity to mend that bruised relationship arose, which I'd have ignored or avoided or just been oblivious to had I been engrossed in my selfish pique. Now my emotions and relationships are back in harmony, and the typical downward spiral has been checked.

A spiritual reflection on this will follow later . . .

New link

My reflections here often grow out of my quiet prayer time.

I don't claim to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. To my mind, that describes someone who prays morning and evening prayer daily, along with the office of readings. However, I do try to pray the last of these each morning. I find some real gems, especially in the extracanonical reading each day, with which I tend to be less familiar than the daily scripture reading.

Occasionally, I'll get midway through the day and realize that my mind wandered during my prayer time, because I lack the slightest recollection of that day's readings. At home, it's a simple enough matter to open my breviary and refresh my memory, often with an, "Oh, yeah," but also frequently with "Wow. I really missed that!" Fortunately, there's an online solution too, a great site to which I've added to my links list.