Homilies With Cushions

This past Monday evening, our JustFaith group began the first of three weeks exploring the topic of simple living, fittingly by inviting a guest speaker to share some thoughts with us. Our guest was an old friend of mine, Larry Keil, with whom Joan and I lived for five years in the Seattle Catholic Worker community. Larry is one of the wisest people I know, and I know that our group appreciated his insights and the gently stated challenges he offered to us.

We then began our discussion of the book, How Much Is Enough: Hungering for God In An Affluent Culture, by Arthur Simon. I'd read the book last year, but am enjoying it even more this time around. Last time around I missed the following little "Preliminary Word" that the author begins the book with.

A Christian from Germany visited the United States shortly after World War II. "I notice your churches have cushions," he commented, suggesting churches of affluence. Then he added, "I notice your preaching has cushions, too." He had gotten a sampling of feel-good sermons that treaded lightly (if at all) on the expectations God has for us regarding love and justice toward the poor, and in this case especially toward marginalized African Americans. The preaching he heard seemed to soothe believers -- either with the idea that their lives were perfectly fine, or perhaps awful but not too worry because forgiveness is cheap.

On these pages, I try to eliminate the cushions so we hear Jesus clearly and do not continue to worship modern-day golden calves, oblivious or unconcerned with the fact that we are doing so. When that happens we miss out on joy -- the joy of receiving God's extravagant grace (which does not seem so amazing if we sense little need of it), and the you of turning our life toward its real purpose.

This book looks at both the cost and the joy of discipleship...

Ouch! That was a nice little kick in the shins to take a look at my own homilies! And look at some of the chapter titles: That Seductive Urge; Fat Wallets, Empty Lives; Rushing to Nowhere; The Poverty of Riches; The Sorrow of Pleasure; The Weakness of Power; How Much is Enough?; Living Simply So That Others May Simply Live; Saying "Yes" to Life; Filling the Heart with Something Better than Cash. So very intriguing!

But the best part of all, for me, has been the healthy conversation that this subject has sparked between my wife Joan and me. I'm a bit ashamed to admit it, but in my eyes the "simple living" conversation had been fairly dead around our house for several years. Whether it was about each other's spending/buying habits, how low to keep the thermostat, or what type of car to drive, those topics seemed to make for conflict. But this book has had a way of re-grounding us in some of our earliest shared values as a couple. And what better time than Christmas to look at these things?!

I'd be interested in hearing how other couples look at the issues involved with creating a more simple lifestyle.

Coming Home

This weekend St. Bridget celebrated Confirmation with the Archbishop at our 10:30 a.m. Sunday Mass, and I wound up giving the homily at the other two Masses. It's the same amount of preparation for a homily even if you give it twice (or once) instead of at every Mass, but that's just the way things go.

It was really just fortune (or the Holy Spirit) that I wound up watching the movie "Home Alone" on the Friday beforehand. Joan was out for the evening, and I wasn't tired enough for sleep. I had, as usual, done some thinking about the homily, and was especially moved by the first reading (Baruch 5:1-9), so I immediately made the connection. Here it is:

Sometimes when I prepare for a homily, I will read something or watch a particular movie that has a connection with the scriptures that I am preparing for, in the hope of getting some good content to use in the homily. For instance, a few weeks ago, as we neared the feast of Christ the King and the end of the liturgical year, a feast that is often associated with the end of time, I went to see the movie 2012, and believe me, I saw a lot of images of apocalyptic destruction: earthquakes, tidal waves, chasms opening in the earth, molten fire erupting from within the earth… It was actually pretty entertaining, but I really didn’t really find anything that I could use in my homily for Christ the King Sunday.

But last night I ran across a movie just by accident, and it’s probably one that you’ve seen too. It was the movie “Home Alone.” It was filmed in 1990, so it’s been around for a while, and it has a Christmas theme, since it’s the story of a very large family leaving on a trip to celebrate Christmas in Europe. However, they all oversleep on the morning they’re supposed to go, and in the panic to dress and get to the airport on time, they leave their youngest child at home, a 5-year-old named Kevin. They’re in two vans going to the airport, and they all sit in different places in the airplane, and so they don’t really discover their loss until it’s too late, and then of course they can’t easily get back home because all the flights back to the US are booked up.

Now if you’ve seen the movie, you probably remember that most of the comedy comes from a pair of thieves who try to break into the home, and run into all the traps that Kevin sets. It really is a funny movie, at least the first time you see it. This was probably the 6th or 7th time I watched it… but then, I’m one of those odd persons who can enjoy watching the same movie time and time again.

But there is one particularly heartwarming part of the story, and that’s what goes on with this grumpy old man who lives across the street from the family. He’s the kind of guy that the neighborhood kids tell scary stories about, and of course Kevin has a short encounter with him at the grocery store that scares him out of his wits and sends him screaming out of the store. However, later in the movie, before the thieves break in, Kevin stops at the neighborhood church, while the choir is practicing for the Christmas service, and the old man is sitting there watching his granddaughter sing. The old man introduces himself, and they begin a short conversation. Kevin tells him that he’s feeling really sorry that his family is gone, especially because he said some hurtful things to them the night before they left. And the old man tells him that he’s sorry too – that years ago, he and his son had gotten into an argument, and he told his son that he never wanted to talk to him again, and his son answered back the same angry way. And – they never did. And that’s why he was in church, because they still weren’t talking, and he couldn’t see his granddaughter any other way. Kevin tells him that he should call his son and tell him he’s sorry, but the old man is still afraid to call, because he’s afraid that his son still won’t want to talk to him.

Well, at the end of the movie... it’s Christmas morning, the thieves have been arrested, the family arrives back home, and everyone is glad to be together again for Christmas… and Kevin looks out the window, to see a car out in front of the old man’s house, with the old man greeting his son, and lifting up his granddaughter in a huge, tearful hug. [I love that – I’m pretty sentimental.]

I think that joyful homecoming is just a touch of the joy of another homecoming, one that we hear about from our first reading today, the book of Baruch! Only this homecoming is multiplied over and over again, for every one of the people of Israel. You see, the setting for this prophecy is that Jerusalem had been conquered, its homes destroyed, its very temple destroyed, the people led away on foot into captivity. And the many of the books of the Old Testament tell of the sorrow and suffering of the people while in captivity. But finally after years of exile, the prophet Baruch says, “Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem! Put on the robe of God’s justice, put on your head the crown of God’s glory! Arise, Jerusalem, look toward the sun, and see all your children gathering from the east and the west at God’s word, rejoicing that God has remembered them. For God has commanded that every lofty mountain be made low, and the valleys be filled up, to make level ground so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God!” Wow! What joy they must have felt!

Now it also happens that our gospel uses words like today to describe the ministry of John the Baptist. His purpose, though, is to urge the people to repent -- because the Lord is coming. There is a need for us to straighten out the crooked parts of ourselves, to smooth out the parts that we’ve allowed to get rough -- just as that old man in the movie Home Alone needed to call his son and say he was sorry. That reaching out was what made his tears of joy possible!

Advent for us is a time when WE should anticipate great joy – but there’s a need for some preparation on our part. Even our secular world knows that – look how much effort our culture puts into preparing for Christmas!

And so we need to put that same time and effort into preparing our hearts as well as our holiday. How do we do it? Christmas is one special time when we can naturally look at ourselves, remembering past years, and past Christmasses, to really see the people and relationships we have on this Christmas, this year. Are there habits that we have gotten into over the last year or years – habits of being too busy, or of blocking out the people or things that matter? Is there someone we might call that we’ve somehow lost track of, or someone to say we’re sorry to, for the brokenness of our relationship, or something else in the past? And what about our relationship with God – maybe we haven’t taken enough time for that most basic and important of all our relationships.

We often say that Christmas is a magical time. Well, it IS a magical time. And yet, it’s not really magical; it doesn’t happen by itself. It takes some preparation on our part. Prepare the way of the Lord!

A Short Conversation About Racism

I mentioned a few post back that I'm helping to facilitate a great JustFaith group this year, on Monday nights. We're in Week Eleven of thirty weeks, and just finished the second of three weeks on Racism. In the first week of the set, we discussed the first portion of the book Rising to Common Ground: Overcoming American's Color Lines by Danny Duncan Collum. It's a very easy book to read and understand, and it clearly explains the history and evolution of slavery and racism in the United States. We then watched a film called Come Walk in My Shoes, about the civil rights movement, that included lots of film clips from the 60's. It reminds the viewer very clearly of the religious roots of this great non-violent struggle. Anyone who thinks non-violence cannot work in the "real world" can see very plainly that it can, and it did.


And then this past Monday night we had the pleasure of having a guest speaker join us, Deacon Joseph Connor, an African-American deacon serving at Immaculate Conception Church in the central area of Seattle. Joseph was just great, and the discussion he fostered was honest, direct, without a lot of frills, and also just the kind of experience that people just don't usually have, even when living, working, or worshipping in multiracial communities. The group dialogue went way over our allotted time, and we wound up skimping on our other intended conversation on the second part of the book; we'll have to make it up next Monday!


Here are a couple of excerpts from the book:

Many black children grow up in a world in which the people with wealth and high status simply don't look like them and in which the people who do look like them are poor or in prison. We shouldn't be surprised if they use this information to begin forming expectations about their own lives. At the same time, white children may observe the correlation between low status and dark skin in the world around them and, if no one offers another explanation, they may logically assume that there is simply "something wrong" with dark-skinned people.....

In December 1955, when Rosa Parks kept her seat on that Montgomery bus, the average while American (outside the South) was deeply complacent and even apathetic about the condition of African-Americans. True, the previous year the Supreme Court had ruled that school desegregation was unconstitutional, and that had struck a panic into Southern whites. But the Court had also left the desegregation remedy to be carried out "with all deliberate speed," an oxymoronic phrase that signaled to the rest of the country that no revolution was imminent. Steriotypically docile and ignorant Negroes -- such as Amos and Andy and Jack Benny's servant, Rochester -- were still the image of black America on TV, and nothing seemed likely to change.

But then came Montgomery, and the children who desegregated the Little Rock schools, and the lunch counter sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides that were ended with mob violence and mass detentions. Then things began to change. It was only when black people took action to claim their rights and confronted violent hatred and repression with nonviolent resistance that the country and the world took notice.......

Bridging divisions between people always begins with acknowledging the wrongs of the past. This is true at the personal level. When there is sin, there has to be confession, followed by penance. When sin is confessed and the sinner is willing to make amends, forgiveness and healing follow. When there is conflict in a family, a marriage, or a friendship, someone has to apologize before it is possible to move on.

The same thing is true among peoples and nations... Perhaps the strongest and clearest example of the power of confession to heal a nation comes from postapartheid South Africa. Apartheid was the system by which a 15 percent minority of white South Africans exerted complete and often brutal comination over the country's black majority. During the struggle to end apartheid, many white South Africans expressed a fear that if the system ever fell, there would be a bloodbath as black Africans took revenge. When the system finally did fall in 1991, there was no bloodbath, and there was no revenge. The transition to majority rule came peacefully, through an election. And that election was followed by an inspiring process of national reconciliation.

Rather than trying and imprisoning those who, under the old system, had committed human rights violations, the new government, elected by a black majority, instituted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the crimes of the past... Anyone who came before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and made a full and honest confession of his or her crimes received a pardon. Anyone who did not confess could be recommended for prosecution... The result was an unprecedented, nonviolent cleansing of several decades of horrendous violence... Post-apartied South Africa has a lot of very serious problems, but race-based resentment over the past is not one of them...

America's racial history cries out for our own "truth and reconciliation commission." After nearly four hundred years, we remain mired in division and resentment. We are, all of us, heirs to a system in which blacks were intentionally destroyed, black children were denied education, and poor white workers were deliberately pitted against their black counterparts. To this day, many of our most intractable social and economic problems grow directly from that system. Yet most white Americans are ignorant of this history and resent any reference to it as an attempt to blame them for sins they never committed.

After our conversation with Deacon Joseph the other evening, I am certain that our society needs to have other conversations like that among people everywhere in our country. If there were, then to have an American "truth and reconciliation commission" would not be so treatening; indeed, we might acknowledge its value, and even its necessity.