What about Joseph?

THE SLEEPING JOSEPH, DREAMING OF HIS MISSION

Today about Joseph, the steady and quiet Joseph.  A dream moves Joseph to take care of Mary and become the legal father of her child Jesus.  He is told quite distinctly in the dream that this child is to save the Jewish people from their sins. 

Pope Francis keeps in his own bedroom a statue of St. Joseph reclining in sleep as a reminder that the Spirit of God sometimes speaks with us in the quiet solitude of our rest or our prayer.

I dream every night.   Once in a dream a few years ago, Pope John Paul ll appeared to my mother and me in her kitchen and we were supposed to provide him with breakfast.   We were totally unprepared.  (To be clear, no other recognized saint ever appeared to me in a dream.)

IN THIS MULTI-MEDIA ON BROWN PAPER, JOSEPH IS SCRATCHING HIS HEAD IN WONDER!

(From the Brady Collection at Wernersville, artist unknown,  Dated likely in the 1920's)

Notably Matthew depicts Joseph as silent even when he is not asleep.   He has none of his own lines in this drama of Jesus’ birth and growth.   He comes on stage and does his duty fully and generously.   But we never hear him say a single word.  In fact after the young family settles in Nazareth, there is only a brief mention of him, years later, when the townspeople refer to Jesus as the carpenter’s son.

But think of the possibilities.   Jesus’ Mother Mary is the one who finally voices the possible and asks Jesus to do the extraordinary at the Wedding Feast of Cana where she pushes the adult Jesus to change the water into wine.  

But what was Joseph thinking all those years before in his carpenter shop?  Typically a son like Jesus would have helped in the shop and would have been a student at a school in the town synagogue.   But Joseph kept it a secret that his son was destined to save his people from their sins.   Joseph accepted patiently the role he was given.   The father in heaven asked him to live an ordinary life with an extraordinary son.   He did not use this relationship to boost his own standing in the community.  He must have been happy to have his son recognized as a good student and a young man with excellent social skills.   But he himself stays in the background.   There is no evidence that Joseph even lives to see their son as a recognized religious leader.

I think of Joseph as a patron saint of shall-we-say ordinary fatherhood if we can even think of fatherhood as ordinary.  He protected his wife and child.    He accepted the gift of his wife and loved her.   He taught his child the skills that he knew, even the social skills at which Jesus excelled.  And his patient love helped to build a world best defined by his son, the gift of God with us.

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

Nativity image from the Brady art collection at the Jesuit Center in
Wernersville. 

It fits the season of Advent to pepper the daily readings and feasts during these four weeks before Christmas with references to the Mother of God, Mary.    And we celebrate in this season both the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and that of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.   As a memory of popular devotion to Mary, I recall celebrating Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, built where it is said that the Mother of God appeared to an Aztec native, Juan Diego.   Even as we celebrated Mass on the main altar at an early hour young couples approached prayerfully at a side altar to present their new-born children before the same image of Our Lady that Juan is said to have found imprinted on his cloak.

There is such an outpouring of affection among the faithful for Mary that Protestants sometimes accuse us of worshiping her or praying only to her as if she were the Incarnate God.   

We know that we do not worship her but look to her as a saint in heaven, indeed as a disciple of her Son, a mother who can help us grow in the graces of discipleship ourselves.   Our love for her, however, does raise the question about why indeed she herself could not have come to us as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.    So I ask God why Mary is not our Incarnate God instead of Jesus.   God in Three Persons could certainly have arranged for that.   And any child that Mary, as our Incarnate God and Savior, might have conceived could have been born to be a disciple to her rather than the other way around.

We cannot question the freedom of God to arrange our salvation in any way God desires.   We know that the Second Person of the Trinity comes as Jesus.  This has been revealed to us.  There are, indeed, some cultural reasons why God might come to us as a man instead of a woman.    One of them, I conjecture, is that women were far less likely to be crucified in the Roman Empire.    And God in the crucifixion of Jesus wanted us to know the greatness of divine love for us.     Jesus showed us such great love by subjecting himself to the worst possible humiliation and suffering that the so-called civilized world has devised: Crucifixion.

Mary as the Incarnate God could have suffered the same fate but women were almost always protected from crucifixion.  We have in the history of lynchings in the United States something similar.   The victims of lynchings were sometimes women but this was exceptional.   Crucifixions and lynchings, public shows of power, are used to humiliate, intimidate and eliminate opposition and they typically fall on men.   Women within the cultures that tolerate crucifixion and lynching suffer humiliations and abuse in other ways and Mary suffered at the foot of Jesus’ cross to represent them.

God chose to come as the man Jesus to take on this responsibility of sharing the worst effects of human sin that any one of us could suffer, humiliations and abuse of any kind.   Jesus wanted all of us and especially all those who suffered like pain and humiliation to be strengthened by the fact that God chose to suffer in the same way.  The sufferings of Jesus and the pierced heart of the Mother of God are 100% sufficient to strengthen and comfort men and women who have suffered atrocities of all kinds.    It is with this man Jesus and his Mother that we will be saved from our darkness.   So we celebrate in this season the beginning of our salvation in the birth of the Child and in the generous willingness of His Mother to follow him in hope.   They become our hope even as the world rejects them.

2019 Christmas Card by Sr. Mary Bur, IHM, one of an annual series!

November photos

NOVEMBER PHOTOS

Sunrise, November 7

States of Red and Blue

Leisure and "Seeing"

We see this volunteer finding a crack in the stone cloister walk!

Short reflections on Leisure and “Seeing”  from

Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

Pieper argues that avoiding idolization of labor today cannot be achieved except by an objection based on some ultimate truth about human nature (which is therefore to be taken as of lasting relevance, he assumes). He notes how there are still vague notions about the seventh day of the week being special and about holidays and quitting time (in Germany), but that we are ignorant of how the accumulated wisdom of our Western cultural and existential tradition “as expressed, say, by Plato, and Aristotle, or the great teachers of Christianity” viewed leisure.

“The most important element in this teaching declares: the ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely in the contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.” P. 22. He asks the question what constitutes here and now an activity that is meaningful in itself, in contrast to an activity that is meaningful for what it produces, and he answers that it is whenever in contemplation we touch, however remotely, the core of all things. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, “The touch of truth is the touch of life.”

He says that in feast days (he glancingly mentions the Sabbath) man has traditionally expressed his being in harmony and awareness of being surrounded by such fundamental realities, in non-ordinary ways.

He says, indeed, that wherever there is lacking the attitude of heart and mind recognizing and seeking to live in harmony with this fundamental truth of human nature (“even if beheld through a veil of tears”), all endeavors to organize relaxation techniques turn hectic and, indeed, become an “outright desperate, form of work”.   

                                                                            See me Seeing you!   Artist:  Eileen Martin



In the second essay, “Learning How To See Again”, Pieper asks the excellent question “How can we be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer of mass-produced goods and a subservient follower beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim? The question really is: How can man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality? He suggests that more and more we tend to see with less detailed grasp, to hear with less detail (in contrast for example to the Indians) and to remember with less capacity.....(These weaknesses are related to the commercial and corrupting images with which materialism has flooded the world.)……

He says that fasting and abstention from the “noise” is a valuable first step but hardly sufficient. “A better and more immediately effective remedy is this: to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.

Nobody (for example) has to observe and study the visible mystery of the human face more than the one who sets out to sculpt in a tangible medium. And this holds true not only for the manually formed medium.”

(From a blogger posting as “Infinite Resources”)

We see how the blue sky highlights this red tree entering the winter.

Indian Summer

October 21, 2019   A beautiful day in our neighborhood.

And at our pond, this aged turtle takes the sun!

And a hawk, probably the red-tailed,  puffs out his chest.  The hawk  would not pass muster with the Audubon Magazine photo editor (but I did see this hawk!).

Summer 2019: Miraculous Marigolds

Miraculous Marigolds

Among my Christmas presents seven months ago was a small envelope from my brother and sister-in-law, Tony and Peggy.   They sent me and my siblings, too, each some seeds from a marigold plant that miraculously appeared in their 2018 summer yard.    I decided to get my hands dirty and here is a record of their gift....miraculous I would say.  Thousands of more seeds.

April 7

April 20

May 25

May 25

June 21

July 1

July 31

August 

Summer 2019: the Butterfly Garden

Summer 2019: The Butterfly Garden

 I have let the summer go be without a single post.    Fortunately there were plenty of things for me to note personally.   But for this record just a few photos.   ( If I can find a paragraph or two of an interesting sermon I will post it!  ) 

Friends of the Spiritual Center who are naturalists with a keen interest in butterflies and their habitats have found our property to be an ideal site for a garden attractive and helpful to monarchs and other butterflies.  Since an early summer installation, the flowering plants in the garden, including milkweed have flourished.    And the butterflies were quick to find this stopping place.

These butterflies (called Red-Spotted Purples) were sunning themselves not in the garden but along a park walk not far away!

The more prolific flying creatures on the property are the spotted lantern flies.   Thousands of them appeared on a set of young maples.  Fortunately our pest control company dealt with them.   But the pests are keeping that company busy!

Tom Prior receives Alumnus Award from Saint Joseph's Prep

         

  Tom Prior receives Prep alumnus award in May 2019 at the annual gathering of the Golden Agers, men graduated more than fifty years ago.  Tom is pictured here with Fr. John Swope, S.J., president, and Kevin Ryan, Director of Alumni

I had the privilege of celebrating the Mass before the Award Luncheon

Homily for "Golden Agers" at St. Joseph's Prep   MAY 31, 2019    VISITATION FEAST

Very often fiction and poetry writers have a particular image or event that they choose as the center of their story.    I recently read a novel in which the ending is very startling and upsetting.   It seems totally improbable sitting there by itself.   But it is at the end of the novel and the author, I believe, first of all imagined this startling event  before he knew anything about the characters and their stories.   So he wrote the story to prepare the reader to accept the senselessness of the startling act, all along hinting at what that act might be without giving the ending away.

I bring this up because on this feast day designated by the Church, the Feast of the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, both of them pregnant, we experience the evangelist Luke doing something of the same thing.   Luke and the earliest Christian community already know the story of the lives of the two children who will be born to these women, John the Baptist and Jesus.    In particular the Spirit inspired the first Christian community to help it understand that Jesus is risen from the dead.   And the community experienced this conviction in the most Jewish of ways as an experience of Jesus returning to them in his risen body.   He encourages them with his greetings of peace and his commission to let the world know of God’s compassion and mercy.          

Luke’s gospel writing about Jesus’ life and the life of his cousin John records events looking back from the viewpoint of Jesus’ resurrection.     Thus Luke adds world-shattering language to the greetings and prayers that Jesus’ Mother Mary and cousin Elizabeth exchange when they meet each other to share their hopes for their children.    Mary is a young  Jewish girl without any special pedigree but she speaks the poetry of gratitude and excitement indicating even in the first months of pregnancy that she already recognizes the salvific nature of the life of her child.   Mary can only hint at what happens at the end of the Jesus’ life, the particulars still unknown to her.  But she has faith in the recognition of her blessedness.   She magnifies the Lord and her spirit leapt for joy.  She hints, too, at her child’s role in the fulfillment of God’s promises to the Jewish people: “He has come to the help of his servant Israel for he has remembered his promise of mercy.”

You can see where we can go with this.   Here we are at an age when we are coming to the end of our lives.   We today have come together and remember with gratitude our experiences at St. Joseph’s Prep over fifty years ago.   Like Luke knows Jesus, we know about our lives and we can look back at our high school years from this vantage point today and put into our seventeen year old mouth some language related to the successes and failures, joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams in all our experiences up until today. These words will certainly have something to do with the characteristics that were taught to us, even imposed on us.                                                  

I look back now and I try to remember or paraphrase the words of my seventeen-year-old mouth or even rewrite them.   I don’t recall magnifying the Lord and leaping for joy the way Luke expresses Mary’s youthful excitement.    Well, we did celebrate when we beat Roman!    The football team paved the way for others since then.  And the Jesuits taught us to be confident that there are good choices ahead.   And they insisted that we develop the desire for the good.    

Like a good fiction writer now enjoying a return to a place of high school formation and now reflecting on all that has happened over fifty and more years, I encourage each of you to find that sentence or two that you might have voiced when seventeen that foreshadows the positive feelings of returning here this day.

I can hear some of our sentences.   “That son-of-a-gun is trying to teach me a lesson…well he can just go fly a kite--(my language is controlled here!).    Or, “I know I need to get up in front of everybody and give a speech but I think I am going to lose my breakfast.”    Or, “I’m working my butt off; what makes you think I can do better?”    Or “I’m tired of working on muscle memory; I just want to go out and play.”   We spoke such sentences.   And we can rewrite them now realizing that they penetrated our characters without breaking our spirits and we grew with them.

Those Jesuits.  They challenged us and opened new paths for us.    This was the work of God calling us to lives filled with love and the deeds of love.    And the best thing about today is not so much us but that this work of building character continues right here day-in and day-out.   And over the last 50 years some 10,000 men have been added to our number.  “Loving, religious, intellectually competent, open to growth and committed to doing justice.”

Prayer for Courage

And allowing others to do the same!

Prayer for Courage  May 2, 2019 

Good God, your creation speaks to us directly about your own courage.   You, while knowing the risks, created us human beings in freedom.   We humans so often are not like loving children who make their parents proud.    And yet your courage in creating us as free persons allows the very possibility of heroic courage among us. 

We learn about courage from your son Jesus Christ and from your prophetic men and women down to our own day.    Their courage is like your courage.   They assert what is right and just.   They are not impulsive but carefully discern what must be done.   They will not let the possibilities of failure stand in the way of difficult missions.   

Your life, good God, is also humble in that you offer even to us all that is good in order to raise us up to you who are not only exalted but one who shares your strength with us.   Help us be like you, God, who is courageous enough to give yourself away to us so that we might share in your life.

So, God, we pray for the ability to act with your practical courage.   Protect us from the dangers of pride.  Help us read the signs of the times and discern with others what is your good.   Help us on our journey of life to be like you and take the risk of giving away our own strengths and opportunities in order to build up others and give them a greater share in the good you have shared with us

Gesu School Philadelphia 25 Years

GESU SCHOOL  1993-2018

On May 9, 2019 500 people gathered at a reception and dinner to give thanks for the mission of Gesu School's first 25 years.  It was reborn in 1993 when its supporting congregation closed its doors.    It had been a parish school since about 1875.    We took the occasion to give a much-deserved honor to Win Churchill who chaired the first independent board and rallied the help of scores of benefactors, thus enabling the school not only to survive but also to flourish.

Prayer of Thanks for Twenty-Five Years

“Blessed are you, Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who has granted a mission to Gesu School, sustained it’s staff and faculty, its children and their families, and invited us here to celebrate this occasion, Gesu School now 25 Years as a school reborn after its supporting congregation closed its doors in 1993.

How can we thank you for every day of these 25 years?!!   Every day people like Immaculate Heart Sister Ellen and Jesuit Father Neil bring to Gesu’s children and their families their love and skillful experience.   But these years started in uncertainty.   A school would have died without the neighborhood grandparents and parents who encouraged us to trust in the Spirit.  It would have died  without the love, the hope and the energy of our honoree this evening, Win Churchill.  Blessed are we to know him and blessed are we to experience his personal encouragement, his creative energy and his support down to this day.   Blessed are all those persons, many with us tonight, from both Christian and Jewish faith traditions who joined with Win to sustain the life of Gesu School.

Whenever we at Gesu thank Your Spirit, O God, we praise you for revealing to us the sacredness of Gesu’s children. While we take pride in offering a comprehensive, innovative education, the children inspire us in their joyful desire to transcend every form of poverty.   We learn from them as they respond to ignorance and prejudice with child-like wisdom and welcoming.   We learn from them as they share with one another and with us a legacy primarily of their African-American spiritual and personal resources.

Now on this occasion, O God, bless our companionship and our breaking of bread together as one community.   Finally, we ask you, Lord, to bless us and teach us as we serve all those in need.  May God’s Spirit continue to lead us to mend our broken world.   I ask us all now to repeat after me these two words.  Alleluia, Amen

GESU SPIRIT MEDAL WINNER!

      

Fr. Neil Ver'Schneider with some of Gesu's students.

The Riot of the Shrinking Violets

The Riot of the Shrinking Violets

Surely we never planted a single violet anywhere on our extensive lawns here at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville.  But this season they are everywhere popping up amid the grasses and sometimes in riotous clusters.   There are surely more than a million of them and they all bloom at once.    It happened during this last week.   No shrinking violets around this spring season!  They celebrate the abundant gifts of Easter.

THE PHRASE FINDER offers this as the origin of "shrinking violet."

"In a poetry magazine called The Indicator, the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) drew attention to the modest wood violet:

'There was the buttercup, struggling from a white to a dirty yellow; and a faint-coloured poppy; and here and there by the thorny underwood a shrinking violet.'"

Notre Dame Paris

Notre Dame, Paris

Reading about the catastrophic fire at Notre Dame and seeing the heart-rending photos of the place in flame, I recall the blessing I had on June 27, 2011.   I entered the Cathedral and immediately heard choral strains.  Even an American melody: "My Lord, What a Morning."!   A choir of college-age Californians were practicing in the rear of the Cathedral preparing for their concert that evening.

What a wonderful place to perform.   Of course I took just a few photos to seal my memory:

Early reports indicate that these windows are intact.  Praise God!

Moon watches over the sunset

The crescent moon watches over the sunset, April 9, 2019

3rd Sun of Lent but 1st of Spring

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2019

 (3rd of Lent, 1st of Spring)

Grey skies and a stiff breeze mark a cheerless Sunday afternoon here at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville.    First Sunday of Spring?    Look across the landscape and see no signs of life (except a turkey buzzard overhead!)    The colors of spring are hard to find and it takes a little exploring.

But the geese are back at the Lake preparing as in the last two years for another gaggle of goslings.

Snow Pics Jesuit Center for Spiritual Growth

Wernersville:  Some viewers might be getting tired of these snow pictures....but these are probably the last.   Only about six weeks to go and the lilacs will be in bloom and maybe we'll have more goslings at Lake Goupil!