Fellow Faith Travelers,
Yesterday in the Office of Readings we had something on Perfection by Diadochus of Photice (I know, one of your favorites) who was suggesting self-abasement as a good way to go in the spiritual life. If you were to go for spiritual direction or to some kind of counseling and you talked about degrading yourself they would attempt to move you in some other direction. This is not one of the common ways of moving forward in the spiritual life today.
I remember when I was first ordained we had a priest on the coast who would not go to bed without having a full tank of gas in his car. He had an inordinate fear of our country being attacked and he needed to be able to have enough gas to get to Idaho where he would be safe. I knew of no other person with this fear and there were considerable comments from other priests about whether we had enough gas in our car or not. But this priest was normal in all other ways that I knew of but this one area.
You know in order to be a saint you don’t need to be normal. We have some saints who had rather unusual spiritual practices and still our Church has declared them to among the Blessed. In todays world it might be a more difficult to have strange spiritual habits because we have more emphasis on communal habits that bring us together and so being an outlaw would not be one of the enticing spiritual habits noticed by the Church.
Recently someone called to my attention that some of my verbiage and style of living were not exactly what they should be. Oh, what do you do with that? And certainly, part of the difficulty is that my straight forward sister agrees with this assessment. But I want you to know that I have been working hard to develop a persona that will put some of you off so that I will not have to deal with so much work. There you go, my personal rationalization for not changing something that would require some hard work. Anyway, I am working on my Sacred Story and it may not come out as you hope it might. And I will try and not tell you how yours should come out. Only listen to me a little bit.
And the Exodus continues, Fr. Dick
Fellow Faith Travelers,
Our Gospel this weekend seems to place considerable attention on the gifts that the three visitors brought to the child Jesus. I was attempting to understand this effort and I started to think of what we call today destination weddings. You are invited to attend which means I think (not really understanding much of this) that first you need to purchase an airline ticket that cost you what? At least $400 and then a couple of nights in a hotel along with some meals. With that outlay the question in my mind asks why I should be buying a gift on top of that huge effort that has already been spent. Shouldn’t the wedding couple make a large contribution to my checkbook for being so foolish as to ask everyone to attend their event so far from home? And these wedding generally have no connection to the Lord so I probably should even bring them up.
We do not have any mention in our Gospel about the place from where our travelers started or how long they have been in transit in order to attend to the child Jesus. It seems that they show up and stay for a few hours and then wave goodbye and are on their way as if it were just a matter of accomplishing a task and it is all over.
Our ancestors on leaving Egypt were 40 years wondering around in the desert and then finally make it to their destination and maybe the only gift that they were bringing to the Promised Land was all the effort of getting there along with the instructions of the Lord during that time.
As a Church community we have not spent effort of helping everyone to think of bringing their weekly efforts to the Sunday Mass as an offering to the Lord. We have spent time reflecting and pushing for financial contributions and that has probably deflected us from understanding any notion of being on pilgrimage to the Lord and how that constant effort is part of our personal salvation history. The new Exodus is taking place with ourselves as present-day participants and we are heading to the eternal Promised Land.
Fr. Dick Rossman
Third Sunday of Advent
Fellow Faith Travelers,
I do not have a good feel for how the season of Advent and even Lent came to pass in its present form that we are using within our church year. I do know that it has taken a period of time for the length to gradually be added to the celebration of both Christmas and Easter. I’m sure it was the thought that these two important celebrations were so important that we should be taking more than on day to celebrate them and therefore we have had the gradual lengthening of the time we use to give those days their proper attention.
Our Jewish ancestors may not have been any better at waiting than we are but they waited a considerable period of time for Jesus, the Messiah to come. We set aside four weeks of waiting for Christmas which is not exactly like waiting for a thousand years for someone to appear. A question I have is to ask if we are waiting at all. What does “waiting” look like and how would someone outside of our household notice in some way that waiting is taking place in our lives or within our house. Does have lights up outside the house signify that waiting is taking place? In talking to ourselves what might we self-communicate about what waiting has left us panting or in some way be constantly be looking for clues and signs that in the next few moments something important will be happening.
I remember as the year 2000 approached I was one of the foolish people who thought that the computers would all collapse and we would be not starting over as humble cavemen but I did think that computers were not as smart as we thought they were. I was wrong, they are smarter than I thought but it is that sort of expectation of readiness does not seem to be all that present in our lives about how we are preparing and looking forward to Jesus being inserted into our lives that we are missing.
In fact, I would say that we are opposed to most kinds of waiting. We do not want to wait in a grocery checkout line, or in a traffic jam. In a restaurant it is at times okay to wait for our good meal to come if we have something in our hand or if we are having a good conversation. But in general waiting is not considered a spiritual exercise but would be more of a waste of our precious time. It would seem that where we are really waiting takes place when we have a serious doctors report after a scan has taken place and it is weeks before we are able to have our precious time with the doctor.
And maybe our God mulling and wondering if and when you and I will catch on to any or a few of the clues would be the best definition of waiting.
Kingdom come, here we come, but let’s not break any records,
Fr. Dick Rossman