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9/11 turns 10: Remembering and reflecting

11 Sep 2011 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Exploring themes such as the harm caused by vengeance and the healing possible through forgiveness, the Sunday readings are tailor-made for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. PrepareTheWord and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops provide a number of useful resources and reflections to help commemorate the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. A slew of articles and media specials this week also are focused on the anniversary of the attacks. Among the many noteworthy stories: Religion helped in 9/11 recovery. According to a summary of a study which will be published in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, religious and spiritual Americans reported better physical and emotional health in the three years after the September 11 attacks. “The more likely people were to participate in religious activities, the more likely they were to experience positive emotion, and the less likely they were to ruminate about the events of 9/11 and the less likely they were to develop physical health problems,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, one of the psychologists who wrote the study. “The same basic message comes from what we call spirituality.” The researchers showed that attendance at religious services was associated with positive emotions such as happiness, affection, and joy; lower odds of developing new ailments; and a smaller number of intrusive, unwanted flashbacks to 9/11. Complicated attitudes toward Muslims. A new poll from the Brookings Institution reports that more than 8 in 10 Americans said that self-proclaimed Christians who commit violence in the name of Christianity are not really Christians. By contrast, less than half (48 percent) said that self-proclaimed Muslims who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam are not really Muslims. "Interestingly, we find that Americans basically have a double standard when it comes to evaluating religious violence," said Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, which produced the survey along with Brookings. The survey of 2,450 adults paints Americans' attitudes toward Muslims as a complex picture of acceptance and wariness. Nearly nine in 10 Americans agreed that "America was founded on the idea of religious freedom for everyone, including religious groups that are unpopular." And by a 2-to-1 margin Americans rejected the idea that Muslims want to establish Islamic law, or Shariah, in the United States. But they were divided as to whether Islam is at odds with American values, with 47 percent agreeing and 48 percent disagreeing. The poll's authors likened this ambivalence about American Muslims to the evolution of attitudes toward Catholics, who were once widely suspected for their loyalty to the pope, and Mormons, once widely reviled for their beliefs. Chaplains reflect on their 9/11 experience. Immediately following the 9/11 attacks spiritual leaders from all traditions gathered to offer comfort to the families, friends, and workers. A few of their reflections 10 years later: Father James Martin, S.J.: “That night, I put on my clerical collar and walked through the empty streets to a nearby hospital to help with victims who never came. The next day, I spent several hours in a counseling center helping bereaved families examine hospital records for their loved ones. “Finally, on Sept. 13, with the city still in chaos, a police officer offered me a ride to Ground Zero, where I would spend the next few days and weeks, along with my brother Jesuits, ministering to the firefighters and rescue workers. “There, at this most terrible place, I encountered grace as powerfully as I ever have--in the outpouring of compassion and charity among the rescue workers.” Rev. Dr. Martha R. Jacobs: “Shortly after 9/11 I was working at Respite Center 1 [near Ground Zero] as an American Red Cross chaplain. I would make my way to the respite center and spend the day with police, fire, and recovery/construction workers, helping them to be able to continue to do their work, listening to their stories of pain and anger, confusion and grief. It was a time of deep listening because I could not take away their pain or their anger or their grief. “I am so thankful for the opportunity to serve those who were there to protect us and recover the remains of those who died. It was not something I ever envisioned when I answered a call to serve God.” Sources: Articles by Naomi Zeveloff for Forward, HuffingtonPost.com, and Lauren Markoe for Religion News Service

religion Islam Muslims americans 911 chaplains spirituality

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Exploring the word

09 Aug 2009 - Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

A common error in the early phase of the spiritual life is to imagine that religion is predominantly a spiritual matter. Spirituality is therefore approached as a sort of neatening-up-of-the-soul, getting our metaphysical affairs in order. We focus our attention on prayer practices and rituals and maybe, just maybe, we become slightly nicer people. We may also become scrupulous and annoying to everyone who knows us. Meanwhile the goal of religion, union with God—a.k.a. holiness—eludes us. The only way to become holy is to become whole, which means a genuine engagement of the very part of ourselves that immaturely “spiritual” people ignore: the earthly life in all of its gritty detail. It’s no accident that Christian communion with God is primarily celebrated in the form of a meal, and that to know God’s goodness we have to taste it and see it. If our quest for holiness doesn’t involve matters as much sensory as celestial, we’re probably sidetracked. All of our sacraments, the central rituals of our religion, are deliberately tactical in nature. So when Jesus calls himself bread, we’re foolish to imagine that it’s only a figure of speech. Christian faith is an incarnate reality. It begins with a Word made flesh, and you can’t separate the two without incurring the essential misrepresentation of either one. The spiritual quest is knit to the material world; or in the words of James, you can’t have faith without works. The centuries-long controversy about which path leads to salvation got decided in favor of both when Catholics and Lutherans signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999. (Methodists signed on to the agreement in 2006.) Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy understood its significance when he declared, “If on judgment day the Lord asks what [I] did, if nothing else, [I] can say that [I] signed the Joint Declaration.” Truth is, we all have to sign on or the Declaration doesn’t mean what it could. It’s a false dichotomy to imagine that “pure” faith exists apart from its performance. We can’t give assent to God’s existence and call that faith. Normally I don’t presume to know the mind of God, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say it doesn’t make a difference in heaven whether we believe God exists or not. To profess faith in God and not to seek the way of holiness is like saying you love that girl but you have no intention of setting a foot in her direction. To believe that we are created by love and for love is to seek the way of love through union with its very principles and attributes. The psalmist says it better: Taste and see. Related scripture links Being taught by God: Isa. 54:13; Jer. 31:33-34 With God all things are possible: Matt. 19:26 or Mark 10:27 Come to me all who labor: Matt. 11:28 Catechism links Eucharist: CCC 1333-1336; 1341-1344; 1356-1390; 2177-83

Authors Alice Camille

spirituality

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Who's listening?

08 Feb 2009 - Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

Most people have a love/hate relationship with work, says Greg Pierce, author of Spirituality @ Work. Pierce always quotes the late columnist Mike Royko who said, “That’s why they pay us to do it.” Pierce says, “There are times in every job when the work is drudgery. That includes work we’re not being paid for, like raising children. On the other hand, there are times in almost everyone’s work—if we let it—when the spiritual dimension can shine through. It’s there, if you can see it.” Sunday’s readings show both the drudgery and ecstasy of work. Job knows only emptiness. Paul and Jesus are on fire with their mission. Pierce organizes an ongoing e-mail conversation exploring people’s experience of faith and work. Join the conversation or just listen in by e-mailing gfapierce@aol.com and asking to be added to the list.

Greg Pierce spirituality work mission

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Quotes

06 Nov 2016 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead. —Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives. —Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

spirituality mediocrity

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Believing implies belonging

Short essays about observed trends in Roman Catholic life - Pastoral trends

According to figures just released by the Pew Research Center, some 13 percent of the U.S. population is secular, with no religious identity at all. The largest group, some 15 percent, are relatively uncommitted white mainline Protestants. The next largest group is relatively uncommitted Catholics, which is about similar size. In other words, within the U.S. population, only about 9 percent are committed Catholics. Although the United States is indeed perhaps the most religiously involved and committed country in the so-called “global north,” only a minority are strongly committed. Catholics trend in this direction as well, although not as strongly. Many who belong, in other words, do not participate. They and their children are increasingly likely to “believe” but not “belong.” But this does not mean that the greatest stirrings of our time are about the quest for meaning and the turning toward spirituality. It simply means that many are opting to be spiritual but not religious. Religion and spirituality, however, are not divorced from the other; believing implies belonging, and belonging involves participation at some level. The task for the church is to pepper these perceptions across society, to reclaim these concepts and understandings through catechesis, community experience, and ritual. Secularization is a myth, not a reality: We are not necessarily moving toward a culture of greater aloofness from organized religion. These proportions instead reflect cycles and changes over time. Organized religion, Catholic life, and church experience simply need to reconnect with culture in a new way, at a new time. © 2005, Bryan Froehle.

Authors Bryan Froehle

spirituality Belonging Participation

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Exploring the word

18 Sep 2022 - Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Money is the root of all evil homilies, at least in the minds of many Catholics. Of the themes people most detest hearing about from the ambo, preaching that fingers the wallet rankles right up there with social justice and anything else that smacks of “politics in church.” But you really can’t preach your way through Cycle C without dealing with this unwholesome topic. Luke is adamant about the spirituality of money—that is, the moral weight of our financial decision-making. God and mammon may not be served together, but they must be considered in tandem. We have to be clear about what belongs to Caesar and what is the Lord’s. The more uncomfortable we feel about this choice, the more urgent our public discussion likely is. First came the prophets Luke didn’t start the debate about money. The prophetic tradition is grounded in a harsh critique of an earlier blessing theology. The patriarchal understanding had been rather simple: Land, wealth, and descendants were rewards from God for a job well done. If God approved of you, you did well, and if you crossed God in some way, you foundered. Frankly, this primitive measurement of economic cause-and-effect ignored the many cases of innocent poverty and guilty wealth. Despite the tunnel vision of blessing theology, it remains alive and vigorous in Christian churches today. Don’t be surprised if many of your parishioners are banking on it. The prophets, disconnected from the power structures and often professionally opposed to them, dismissed blessing theology in favor of cold-eyed social analysis. Material wealth is not divinely orchestrated to arrive in the hands of the deserving, they insisted. More likely, material gain comes to one at the loss of another, not always honestly or morally. Even when our personal prosperity is divorced from the contact point of immortality—insulated from the injustices perpetrated in sweat shops that sew our clothing; against migrant workers that harvest our food; and at the expense of the working poor struggling along at or below the minimum wage to provide our daily services—our individual wealth is hardly clean. Few of us know much about how our portfolios fill with money gained for us in the shadows of the global economy. The prophets pointed a finger, not only at those who deliberately fixed their scales for cheating, but also those who enjoyed beds of ivory and drank wine by the bowlful while others around them barely slept or ate. If you think money homilies are unpopular now, consider that prophets were put to death for speaking unpopular messages in the streets. Keeping the consuming classes warm and well fed has always been the priority of empires. Once people start asking questions and examining structures, crowns are liable to tumble off heads. It’s important to the stability of the system that nations largely accept the invisible framework of their success. To be blunt, wealth always comes with strings attached, and if you follow those strings to their ends, you’ll find the suffering that delivered it. The prophets yanked those strings ruthlessly to draw attention to what was at the other end. The prudence of the dishonest Jesus appears to muddy the waters a bit in the unloved parable of the Unjust Steward. Scholars spend much of their energy unpacking the accounting practices of stewards in first-century Palestine, which are interesting but unhelpful to many 21st-century listeners. What bothers us most is that Jesus holds up the wrong person as an example—how can the bad guy be the good guy in this story? Of course, Jesus regularly champions undesirable heroes—Samaritans, Gentiles, prostitutes, and tax collectors—so why are we taken aback here? To follow the usual formula, we have to remember that Jesus never says the Samaritans have the theology right; that Roman occupation is a fine idea; that it’s good to be a prostitute or perfectly moral to serve as a tax collector. In the same way, Jesus doesn’t propose that the dishonest steward is taking the high road in using tricky accounting to make some new friends. What Jesus does say very plainly is that people dedicated to material wealth are more committed to that pursuit than those who say they are dedicated to spiritual wealth. That’s all. And that’s damning enough. Those surrendered to mammon will chase it—as drug dealers or crooked shopkeepers, stockbrokers, or politicians or swindling clerics or wherever the money trail takes them. The pursuit of money is consciously amoral, and while it may incidentally lead us on the high road, it just as automatically transfers to the low road when productive to do so. We can presume Jesus is not advising us to be amoral about spiritual treasures, because those values are at cross-purposes. He does want the children of light to prove trustworthy in small matters so they can proceed to greater ones. Jesus wants us, simply, to get serious about pursuing the Kingdom. Applying the word Pray for the powerful "Knowledge is power,” according to Ben Franklin. I won’t argue with that, but we also know that money is power, too, though of a different order. So along with pointing prophetic fingers at the rich and powerful, we should also remember our responsibility to pray for them. We Christians are quick to open soup kitchens on skid row and ministries to prisoners, but there’s no stampede to marshal a salvation army for those on the top of the material heap. There are souls to be saved in every social class and conversions to be sought at the heads of government, industry, and religion that may be crucial for those at the bottom of these structures. Celebrity figures likewise have great influence that can be used profitably as easily as squandered, so why not harness it for good. Heads of households and classrooms, law enforcement and bosses of companies large and small all need our prayers for wisdom, discernment, moral strength, and compassion. If we can get the dishonest steward to exercise his ambition for the cause of the children of light, everybody wins. Related scripture links Render to Caesar: Luke 12:13-15 Other money passages in Luke: Luke 6:20; 12:13-34; 14:33; 16:14, 19-31; 21:1-4 Catechism links Money: CCC 952; 2269; 2401-2414; 2419-2425; 2443-2449 Pray for the powerful: CCC 1349; 1900-1904; 2240; 2636; 2822

Authors Alice Camille

spirituality of money blessing theology Wealth Parable of the Unjust Steward mammon money homilies

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