Reflection for Monday, December 7, 2015

Memorial of Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

IS 35:1-10
PS 85; 9AB AND 10, 11-12, 13-14
LK 5: 17-26

The capacity of Biblical texts to transcend their original context never ceases to amaze me. At one level, the passage from Isaiah speaks to a very particular situation, foreign to most of us: exiles returning from afar will come home in joy as the desert springs into life and threats to safety vanish. 'Hope' takes on a very specific tenor in a desert: the bloom of flowers, the availability of water, and the disappearance of threatening animals.

For us, living in St. Louis in 2015 as more or less privileged people, the world created by the poetry of the readings might seem very far away. I lived in the Arizona desert when I worked among the Navajo people, so prayers for rain and awe at desert flowers are not foreign to me, but all in all, the world of the Biblical text is manifestly not our world. Yet the strangeness of the landscape it describes stands in tension with the hope with which we can so easily identify: a passion to overcome fear, to strengthen those who have been crushed by the weight of their lives, and to work through the traumatic encounters that still doom so many people to truncated and pain-filled existences. How relevant, even for those of us who never visit literal deserts, who could not tell a jackal from a hyena, and for whom "Carmel" is the stuff in the middle of chocolates.

Similarly in the gospel, the urgency of healing for a friend in need transcends the cultural strangenesses that blocks full appreciation. A house, a crowd, a hopeful few people with a friend who is out of options. Luke's Gentile audience was familiar with tile roofs rather than the daubed stick roofs that a Semitic audience would recognize, and the thought of breaking through any kind of roof (Where are they? Jesus' house? Are they screwing up his roof?) might seem outlandish to us. Whether we can identify with their culture, we can identify with their pain and their sense of urgency to help someone in need.

When Jesus tells the paralytic that his sins are forgiven, and the elders are offended, he tells them that saying that sins are forgiven seems easy (there is not much in the way of evidence for it actually happening), so he will do something harder to say (since there IS evidence for it happening) - take up your mat and walk. Which the paralyzed man does. Which indicates that the other part is true too: if Jesus can cure the paralyzed, then he can certainly do something less visibly dramatic, like forgive sins.

I can't literally enable paralyzed people to walk, but the first reading holds several imperatives addressed to the reader, which are presented as literal tasks: "Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm the knees that are weak, Say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not!" No magic there, just the courage to share compassion and recognize kinship across barriers. I can do that. Then, says Isaiah, God will give sight to the blind, open the ears of the deaf, enable the lame to leap and the mute to sing. Glad God is doing that part, because that's all outside of my skill set.

If we can reach across millennia and wildly diverse cultures to make sense of such strange texts, with their talk of miracles and Middle Eastern landscapes, how do we continue to be so utterly baffled by people in our own time? How is understanding so often out of reach? Watching the news gets depressing fast: massive racial injustices; ongoing violent crime; environmental catastrophe looming ever closer; and the silencing of women, people of color, the young and the old, gender and sexual orientation non-conforming persons, and more. I can't wave away any of that terror and pain, but I can do something precisely because, even if I don't always know from the inside the anguish that the other feels, I do know the urgency to love and be loved, the silencing power of pain, and the crush of injustice. The distance between people is real, but it need not be absolute: we can seek to understand the other in his/her/hir reality and hope to respond in love.

Patrick Cousins is the Assistant Director of Campus Ministry.

Reflection for Sunday, December 6, 2015

Second Sunday of Advent

BAR 5:1-9
PS 126:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6

PHIL 1:4-6, 8-11

LK 3:1-6

All of us can identify with carrying something heavy and painful, and then being broken open as we face whatever it is in truth, bringing it before God. The beauty of the readings today is the confirmation that brokenness is not the end of the story! These readings are literally saturated in transformation, joy, and glory. Throughout the readings we have themes of transformation, joy is mentioned seven times, and glory is mentioned six times. In Baruch, Jerusalem exchanges a robe of mourning and misery for a cloak of justice from God. In the Gospel, repentance is the transforming power of forgiveness. In the psalm, tears are transformed into rejoicing. The images of being sent forth in weeping and returning in rejoicing are repeated over and over. How appropriate for Advent! What a beautiful invitation, wrapped up in a promise!

This is a promise that God will remember us in our Advent journey, if we are willing to do the tough work of honesty. In the middle of the passage from Baruch, we hear a verse echoed in our Eucharistic Prayer, “Gathered from the east and the west at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God.” We are invited to bring to God all of the best and worst of ourselves, and then trust that She will transform us into Her glory. St Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is human beings fully alive.” To be fully alive, to be the glory of our God, we must enter our Advent journeys willing to be broken, placing our hope in the coming of the One who transforms us!

Theresa Schafer is a Senior Theological Studies major and a Campus Ministry intern.

Reflection for Saturday, December 5, 2015

Saturday of the First Week of Advent
IS 30:19-21, 23-26
PS 147:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
MT 9:35 --10:1, 5A, 6-8

Sometimes I picture myself in the disciples’ shoes as Jesus sends them out to do Kingdom work. I hear a grand, booming voice and usually visualize Morgan Freeman looking me deep into the soul with his wise old eyes, boldly and articulately telling me to: “GO! to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand!’ Cure the sick! Raise the dead! Cleanse lepers! Drive out demons! Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.” (Emphases added for effect.) When I leave that daydream, I spring out of my chair shouting, “Yes, God! Send me! I want to cure the sick and raise the dead!” Then, my roommates look at me strangely and I calmly sit back down. The Lord’s voice sends us out and “sounds in our ears” in peculiar ways. I’m reading a book called The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner that explains God’s language, “the alphabet of grace,” in this way: “Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves…the meaning of the incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves.”

Personally, I find it exhilarating when I think I can hear the voice of God so clearly spoken to me through his Word, my brothers and sisters in Christ, or simply everyday life. Every once in a while, I catch myself hesitating, “Wait, you want me to do what?” but often my initial excitement to hear God speak directly to me carries me through to at least plant the seeds that He hands me. What I find hard to believe sometimes is that when I plant those seeds, the Lord will provide rain to water it. I usually have my watering can handy just in case. Unfortunately, it seems like the two things God calls me most often to do are generally my least favorite things to do: listening and waiting. I’ve heard it said that it is how we go about waiting that tells the most about our faith. Jesus calls us to trust Him, even when we can’t quite see his angle. Once we do the Lord’s work and plant a seed, we can never control when or how we see results – we release the proverbial reigns. For a control freak like me, that’s infuriating. But Jesus calls me into relationship with Him and into the deepest level of trust I can possibly muster. He calls us to take chances doing what the Lord requires of us. But sometimes what’s required of us is that we wait. The challenge is to ditch the watering can and wait for the rain.

Alec Beeve is a junior at SLU studying biomedical engineering.

Reflection for Friday, December 4, 2015

Friday of the First Week of Advent
IS 29:17-24
PS 27:1, 4, 13-14
MT 9:27-31

“Do you believe that I can do this?”

Jesus asks the two blind men this question. His phrasing of the question is interesting; He does not ask if they believe they will see again or even if they believe that He, Jesus Christ, can make them see again. Jesus addresses more than just their blindness when He asks the broader statement of “Do you believe that I can do this.” The “this” that Jesus asks can be referring to anything: His ability to guide us, to heal us, or to save us from our sins. Jesus isn’t just asking the two blind men this question, He is asking all of us. This seems like an easy question to answer. Of course He can do this, whatever this is, He’s Jesus Christ, the son of God, and He has the power and mercy to do anything. But how often do we act as though we don’t believe He can do it. How often do we doubt in His timing and His love for us. When we get frustrated at God for taking too long or for not answering us clear enough and we turn away from Him.  If that is what happens, our answer to “Do you believe that I can do this?” is a no. Or a maybe. Or a yes I believe You can do this but I’m not ready to let You.

The ways in which we answer Jesus’s question will look different for all of us. But in order to be prepared to respond to Jesus, we need to fully entrust our hearts to God.  When we do this, we can see how God shows us in our day to day lives that He can do this.  

There are days where we decide to put our trust in God and answer yes and there are days where we burden ourselves and answer no. Luckily for us, Jesus asks us this question of “do you believe that I can do this” every day. All day long. He never stops asking us this question. Because regardless of how we chose to respond to Him, the answer to this question will always be: yes He can do this.  

Franki Feinberg is a sophomore nursing major from Houston, Texas.

Reflection for Thursday, December 3, 2015

Memorial of Saint Francis Xavier, Priest

IS 26:1-6

PS 118:1 AND 8-9, 19-21, 25-27A

MT 7:21, 24-27

In the Gospel Reading for this day, Christ tells the people, “not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.“

On orthodox Christian theology, those who do not enter the kingdom of heaven will find themselves in hell. And so the implication of Christ’s words is that in hell there will be people who have said their prayers and addressed Christ as Lord. 

This must be one of the most fearful passages in the New Testament.  Who, then, is saved if calling Christ ‘Lord’ is not enough? And what do we have to do to be in the group of the saved?

We might try to answer these questions by thinking of Peter, who is the rock on which the church is built. Christ says that those who enter into heaven are the people who have built their house on a rock. What makes Peter a rock for the church?

The first thing to notice here is that Peter is not a sinless man. If getting into heaven requires doing the will of the Father, then doing the will of the Father  can’t be a matter of being righteous. In fact, Peter’s sin is just the same as the sin of Judas, the villain of the Christian story: Peter betrayed Christ in Christ’s hour of need. 

Of course, Peter repented his sin. But, then, so did Judas. The difference between Peter and Judas does not lie in their repentance, but in their attitude and relation to Christ after they sinned.

When Judas saw and repented his sin, he killed himself. He threw himself away as hopeless. When Peter saw and repented his sin, he did not let go of Christ. When after his resurrection Christ asked Peter, “Do you love me?”, Peter was willing to say ‘yes’. Both Peter and Judas said ‘Lord’ to Christ. But only Peter really came to Christ. Judas said ‘Lord’ to Christ, but in the end he was unwilling to come to Christ.

And so this is the difference between those who enter the kingdom of heaven and those who don’t, between those who do the will of the Father and those who don’t.  Peter came to Christ as he was, not righteous but sinful. And he cleaved to Christ anyway, even with his own failures and errors. Peter is the rock of the church because he built the house of his life on the rock that is Christ.

In John 6:28-40, people anxious not to be excluded from the kingdom of heaven ask Christ what they must do in order to do the will of God. And this is what Christ tells them: they must come to him.

And, Christ adds, no one who comes to him will ever be cast out.

This is a good thought for us to reflect on as we wait for him to come to us in Advent, isn’t it?

Dr. Eleonore Stump is the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy.

Reflection for Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Wednesday of the First Week of Advent
IS 25:6-10A
PS 23:1-3A, 3B-4, 5, 6
MT 15: 29-37

As the prophet Isaiah proclaimed,

On this mountain the LORD of hosts 
Will provide for all peoples... 

As the Psalmist wrote,

I shall live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

As Jesus spoke,

“My heart is moved with pity for the crowd...
I do not want to send them away hungry...”

^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^

Three years ago, as I reflected on these same scripture passages for this same Advent series, my thoughts were drawn to the problem of scarcity and the abundance that is Christ Jesus. Today, as I reflect on these scripture passages, my thoughts are drawn to the problem of fear, and to my obligations to overcome that fear, in light of all that the Lord has promised me. Friendship, care, hospitality, abundance. The Lord has shared it all with me. Let me not be afraid, so that I might do the same, in His image.

^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^_^

As an economist, I’ve learned the great potential and value of human freedom. A people who are free, the discipline of economics teaches us, are a peaceful and a materially prosperous people. As a Christian, I’ve learned that freedom is a Gospel theme. As Jesus declared in the Gospel of St. John, “...the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). As St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). The Gospels’ freedom though is different than economic freedom. The Gospels’ freedom is not mere freedom of choice. The Gospels’ freedom is found when we truly accept that we are created in God’s image, and then conform ourselves to that image. We experience the Gospels’ freedom, paradoxically, when we constrain ourselves; when we choose to not let fear overcome us; when we bind ourselves in servitude to others and share our friendship, care, hospitality, and abundance - joyfully, in the image of God. Gracious and loving God, as You became my friend, through the incarnation of Your son; as You have shown me radical care and hospitality; as You have promised abundance to me; help me to not be afraid of others. Help me to become friends with strangers; to show radical care and hospitality to all; to share with others the abundance available to me. In so doing, help me to experience the freedom of the Gospel, the freedom that comes when I choose to not be afraid and bend my will towards You. Friendship, care, hospitality, abundance. The Lord has shared it all with me. Let me not be afraid, so that I might do the same, in His image.

Bonnie Wilson is Associate Professor of Economics in the Cook School of Business.

Reflection for Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Tuesday of the First Week of Advent
IS 11:1-10
PS 72:1-2, 7-8, 12-13, 17
LK 10: 21-24

Hope, Promise, and Fulfillment: 

“I come as a pilgrim of peace and a messenger of hope.”

Throughout the Scripture readings of Advent are littered conceptions of promise and fulfillment.  The prophet Isaiah and the passage of today’s reading serve to exemplify this.  Throughout the book of Isaiah is the hope and promise of a future prophet, a wise and just leader. Isaiah’s hopes are exemplified in the psalm as well (psalm 72).  The psalmist anticipates this perfect king proclaiming peace and justice. 

In our own world, on our campus at SLU, Advent is often full of this desire for peace, hope, and fulfillment. It’s a four week long sigh, one that can be deeply exhaled into a sense of full stillness and presence. It’s an alternative to our busyness, an insistent invitation to pay attention. This year (not unlike other years) there’s a tiredness, a feeling of depletion. I see it in the students I connect with, and in my interactions with colleagues across campus. Busyness and self-inflicted chaos shrink our worldview, our ability to be present, and our empathy for others. Advent is an invitation to sit right here. In this moment as we are and with what we are carrying. Not who we wish we were or what we are capable of at some elusive time and place in the future. It is a time to consider who we are and who God will become. How the anticipation of the Incarnation will be lived out.

But what of Isaiah’s call to justice?  How can we marry this need for stillness with this call to justice? As we consider ourselves in this place and time, and the anticipation of Emmanuel (God with us) Pope Francis offers a poignant illustration.

This past week Pope Francis arrived in the Central African Republic (CAR).  He is there to inaugurate the year of mercy. The CAR is a country marked by intense conflict causing the flight of almost a million refugees, contentious regional factions (often along religious lines), and a tumultuous presidential election on the horizon later this month. Upon his arrival he said to the gathered crowd; “I come as a pilgrim of peace and a messenger of hope.”

In light of today’s readings there is a particular significance to his visit.  The road ahead for this conflict torn country will be long and arduous. Much like the first reading from Isaiah there is a  call to righteousness and peace rooted in justice and the impossibility of oppositional factions becoming neighbors, co-creators. 

There is a clarity to the righteousness Isaiah speaks of, one that Pope Francis echos.  Not righteousness in the sense of self-righteousness that we often think of today. But rather a firm insistence that God stands on the side of the poor, of the suffering, of the marginalized.  In the second part of the passage Isaiah illustrates several contradictory images of foes co-existing peacefully; “the wolf shall be a guest, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid”. These and others are more than some adorable Buzzfeed article of cute animals cuddling.  They are seemingly paradoxical illustrations that may lead us to justice.  Or as Pope Francis spoke of from the CAR an appeal to “lay down the instruments of death.” 

I encourage you to sit with this paradoxical need for inner stillness and ardent work for justice this Advent. How might we imitate become pilgrims of peace and messengers of hope? Perhaps our need and ability to cultivate a deeper sense of spiritual wellness and abundance might lead us to greater compassion to our intertwined communities from here in St. Louis to the Central African Republic.  Our personal abundance and global justice might intersect at our Advent desire for hope, promise, and fulfillment in our sustaining Creator.

Cynthia Enghauser is Campus Minister for the Nursing School and the College for Public Health and Social Justice.

Reflection for Monday, November 30, 2015

Feast of Saint Andrew, Apostle

Rom 10: 9-18

PS 19: 8, 9, 10, 11

MT 4: 18-22

I’ve been fishing a few times in my life.  When I was little, I went camping with my mom and brother and we did get into a rowboat and actually fish.  Mostly what I remember about fishing were the worms that we had to put on the hooks.  Not too pleasant to a little girl.  There are different types of fishing.  One is that image of sitting in a rowboat out in a vast lake with little around.  One is fly fishing, which my friend John at John Carroll University says is a whole different ballgame.  The other is commercial, the kind where you cast your nets.

Today’s Gospel from Matthew (4:18-22), gives us the story of Simon (Peter), Andrew, James, and John who are called by Jesus to join Him.  They were all fisherman and Jesus came upon them as they were casting their nets.  I can imagine all of them, hauling nets and fish out of the sea.  And I can imagine their surprise as Jesus asks them to follows Him and be fishers of people.  Their father Zebedee must have thoughts they were crazy to get up and leave it all.  The Gospel story does not share how they were feeling, what they experienced, what emotions they had.  But we can imagine that in the story.  Perhaps they were awed, frightened, or even joyous and excited.  Perhaps Zebedee was angry or maybe he was thrilled that Jesus called his own people.

As I reflect on the Gospel and on my experience of fishing, I share a few elements.  First, if you are in a boat, fishing by yourself or perhaps with friends, one thing you experience is the silence.  You have to be quiet when you fish so you don’t scare the fish away.  You also have to be patient.  It is a good way to pray about Advent – finding some moments of quiet and stillness, and yes perhaps even patience, to reflect on the story of the birth of Jesus and on your part in that story.

Second, when you are fishing, you are experiencing God’s beauty and creation.  As Pope Francis points out in his encyclical Laudato Si’, “nothing in the world is indifferent to us” and so as we experience creation, whether it be in fishing or in a walk in a forest, we imagine how we treat creation.  This is also a good way to pray during Advent.  How do we treat the creation around us and care for it, just as Jesus was born to care for us.

Finally, imagine the enormity of working with a fishing crew and lots of outrageously huge nets.  I can imagine myself trying to cast those nets out into the water and bring back the bounty of the sea.  But I can also imagine casting my own net wider than that.  As Peter, Andrew, James, and John were called to cast their wide nets for people who would be followers of Christ, how do I cast my own net wide enough to include all those people around me?  Given the injustices and murder and trouble in today’s world, how am I a welcoming presence to those who are different than me?  And in praying about Advent, how can I be like that wide eyed baby Jesus – loving all who I place my eyes upon.  How can I see Christ in everyone I encounter – no matter what color, status, religion, or state in life?

As we enter the first week of Advent, let’s think about these reflections and include them in our prayer.  How can I find moments of quiet, solitude, and yes patience with myself and others?  How do I treat the creation that is around me?  And how do I welcome the stranger into my life, just as the disciples welcomed the stranger Jesus?

Sue Chawszczewski is the Director of Campus Ministry.

Reflection for Sunday, November 29, 2015

First Sunday of Advent
JER 33:14-16
PS 25:4-5, 8-9, 10, 14
1 THESS 3:12-4:2
LK 21:25-28, 34-36

“The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise,” writes Isaiah in today’s reading. The promise is of a new reality for the people of Israel. The promise to be fulfilled is that a “just shoot” will arise in the house of David and that through that one, justice will be established and when justice, peace also will follow.

This is the reading for the first Sunday of Advent, which, in the Church’s calendar, marks New Year’s Day. The new year starts with a promise from the Lord. And the promise is spoken to the people in the midst of their exile. It is spoken at a time when it seems that promise is really very far off form being fulfilled.

This seems a desirable prophesy for today as well. And it seems just as unlikely that it will be fulfilled now as it probably did then to the people of Israel. We think of Syria and Iraq and the slaughter of innocents that ISIS continues to perpetuate. We think of the intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine, of the Ukraine, of the immigrant crises in the Mediterranean and on our own southern border. We think of the violence on our own streets in St. Louis and the ever widening gap between the haves and the have nots, throughout this country of ours and in every part of the world today.

Justice? Peace? Really?

It is a new Church year starting today. Advent means coming toward. The Lord is coming toward us again in a new ways. But we are not pretending that he has not already come, definitively. God has has already come in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. But this is a new moment for us to try to open up again, anew, to that coming, and to let it transform us. Christ comes to transform the world into something different, to overcome our isolation, our fear, our pettiness, our hatred and divisions that we establish among ourselves. The way Christ comes is in what looks like weakness.

This is the key for us. Peace can be established around us in our daily living if we allow that same method of Jesus to be ours. Instead of spending most of our time blaming all those other people “out there” for not being just and not establishing peace, let the call be to start with ourselves today.


Fr. Chris Collins, S.J. is Assistant to the President for Mission and Identity.

What are you waiting for?

Often enough, Advent is presented as a waiting game - when I was a child the Advent calendar with its daily piece of chocolate was a way of making it a little more bearable to wait four whole weeks for Christmas. So this year, as I think about the beginning of this season, I ask myself (and you):

What are you waiting for?

I imagine two senses in which that question could strike the reader. What are you waiting for? In one sense, it asks what hope, what anticipation is keeping you afloat. The waiting is for something to come, something to happen, from outside. That reading fits well with the literal meaning of Advent, from ad + venire, "to come to," like the refrain of that old Advent song, "O Come O Come Emmanuel": "Rejoice, rejoice/Emmanuel/Shall come to thee, O Israel." Such a "waiting in joyful hope" resonates with the final words of the Bible: "Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!"

But that question reads differently if we read it with the insistence of the person whose life depends on a different future (avenir), a rearrangement of the powers that be, something new that is yet to come (a-venir). What are you waiting for? Where are you? What is keeping you from doing something about the blood of the innocents which cries from the earth? Why do you not do something to repair the world which is being run off its tracks?

While I suspect that most Christians have a hard time imagining it, the Biblical tradition is loaded to the gills with people having the audacity to ask those laden, anguished questions of God: "How long, O Lord?" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Looking at the immensity of the needs around us, we might transpose those questions onto ourselves and our peers or, better yet, listen more attentively to the anguished voices that have been asking us those questions and awaiting our response. In Syria and Lebanon, in Mali, in Paris, Iraq and Afghanistan, in Ferguson and Baltimore and so many other places which cry for a newness to come, our desire to wait is a luxury that people cannot afford.

What are you waiting for?

As Martin Luther King put it, "Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively." If we choose simply to wait for things to change in our world, wait for God to drop a better world in our laps, then December 25 will come and go like any other day. If we celebrate the birthday of Jesus without enacting that which he enacted with his life, unto his death - the reign of God, the promise of a radical newness which is to come into people's lives - then we turn the season and the day into an anniversary rather than an invitation.

But it IS an invitation: Campus Ministry invites you to reflect with us every day this season as our friends, students, and colleagues share their dreams and their efforts to enact a world which we have been promised. We invite you to act with us to build that world which we hope and trust is to come. And we invite you to celebrate with us in our weekly and daily liturgies across campus.

What are you waiting for?

Patrick Cousins is the Assistant Director of Campus Ministry.