Text: Genesis 18:20-32a, Psalm 138, Colossians 2:12-14, Luke 11:1-13.

For a number of years now, I’ve been a student of the martial art of aikido. While we don’t typically put a lot of emphasis on rank, there are gradings, for which we prepare to demonstrate specific techniques. The first technique called for on the first test, typically undertaken a few months into a beginner’s training, involves leading an attacker delivering an overhand strike harmlessly to the ground with a few simple-looking movements. We don’t teach it first because it’s easy: we teach it first because it’s fundamental and difficult. We don’t expect anything like perfect execution in the first grading, but best to start working on it early, because it takes decades of practice to refine this ideally effortless and gentle movement.

The Lord’s Prayer was the first prayer I learned as a child, and is widely known even outside Christian circles. It seems so simple, familiar, and safe to us that we sometimes lose the meaning of the words in rote recitation. In today’s Gospel, we are reminded that Jesus gave it to his most devoted disciples in response to a difficult and deep question that still challenges us today. It is a master class in following Jesus into his relationship with the Father, given in a few simple-sounding verses.

I won’t pretend to have plumbed the depths of this spiritual school, and the readings were long enough that I should keep this reflection short anyway. I’ll share a couple of aspects that stand out for me, and encourage you to explore more of its meaning for yourselves.

We often call this prayer by the first words we use: the “Our Father.” Not my Father, but ours. Even when we are alone, we do not pray this in isolation, but as part of a community. When we pray for daily bread, for forgiveness, for deliverance, it is not just for ourselves but for us all that we each pray. Abraham didn’t pray for his own protection, but for that of the righteous people in the town that God intended to destroy, even though they weren’t of his family; he had likely never even met them. In praying this prayer, I find that I cannot be a son of the Father without being a brother to each of you, who have as much claim on God’s love and Christ’s inheritance as I do.

I don’t see the Lord’s Prayer as a passive prayer. I don’t think that we are called to sit idly by and watch as the Father makes everything happen independent of us. We are created with free will as participants in God’s plan. If God’s name is to be hallowed, I have a role to play in accomplishing that, both in my own posture towards God and in the honor or disgrace my words and actions bring God. If the kingdom is to come, it must come into my heart and I must submit to God’s rulership. If we are to have our daily bread—physical and spiritual—I’m called to share in the work to provide it.

The daily bread I provide is not just my own, but for my neighbor who, for whatever reason, may have none themselves. My neighbor—and we remember whom Jesus said that was—is my sibling in God, and although I do a poor job of living this way, they have as much claim as I do on everything, even what I consider “mine.”

If you take nothing else from my words today, I invite you to ponder in your own heart the words we say in this little prayer. To me, it is an inexhaustible spring of inspiration, guidance, and strength; God indeed gives me the good gifts of the Spirit when I ask, even as fumblingly as the beginner I am. In teaching this prayer to the disciples, Jesus has given us all a path into the fullness of God’s generous and mysterious love.

Reflection for July 14, 2019 (15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time) by Ewelina Frackowiak

Deuteronomy 30. 10-14; Colossians 1. 15-20; Luke 10. 25-37

Let me ask you up front: How do you feel about the story we have just heard – the story of the Good Samaritan? How do you place yourself in the context of this story? Are you indifferent towards it, are you feeling good about yourself because you identify with the Samaritan, because you take yourself for someone who helps a lot, or you are right at this moment beating yourself up thinking that you are like the Levite and the priest and you should help people in your life more than you do?

The reason I am asking is this: I want to distinguish between the inner guidance each of us has within oneself and the merciless inner judge by the help of which our own minds turn against us. I want to differentiate between the inner guide, which we call the Holy Spirit, and the inner critic, which the psychologists call the superego.[1] If I succeed, we will be able to feel the difference between these two.

But you may already sense well what I am talking about. Can you recall a time when you did something because you wanted to feel good about yourself or you wanted to avoid your own harsh judgement about yourself? How did it feel? Now compare it with the feeling that you had when you did something out of kindness – either kindness for yourself or kindness for others.

From my own experience, I can tell you that the first scenario – me helping others because I DON’T want to be admonished by my own mind and I DO want to feel good about myself – feels draining and constricting. The help I gave did not feel real. Is that how it feels for you as well?

Acting out of compassion, on the other hand, is effortless and feels so natural that it may not occur to you to think of it as something good or even to think of it at all. Do you remember Jesus’ advice “when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”[2]? That’s how acting out of inner guidance, acting out of compassion feels like. Unself-conscious. Effortless.

As the Jesuit Anthony de Mello used to say: “Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite, it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep; (…) [it] can perform acts of service, it is powerless to produce love (…).”[3]

But how can we produce love, awake compassion, access the inner guide? And let’s stress it, the inner guide is always within us, it is impossible for us to lose it. We do not want to create it, we just want to tap into it. And the way to do it, the way to let kindness emerge, is to loosen up the grip that the inner critic has on us.

When we were children, we received admonitions and praises for our different behaviors. Out of those we learned a way we should be in the world, which was of course useful. But we also formed in our minds an idealized self-image, an ideal which we aspire to become. The inner critic berates us for not measuring up to that ideal or it praises us for nailing it and being the best. Both of these strategies of the inner critic are hurtful. The superego is not compassionate. Its harshness, its boastfulness tells it apart from the inner guide which has compassion as one of its qualities.

So what is the idealized self-image that your inner critic is using against you? What is your inner critic telling you? For a start we can learn to recognize its attacks. Let ourselves feel how hurtful they are. When we allow ourselves to feel the hurt, it will open the door for compassion.

My own inner critic tells me that I am not smart enough. When I hear it, I tell it: “It hurts”. Or I tell it to go away. If I do that, it feels a bit more spacious in my mind and I feel stronger.

The Samaritan helped the injured man because “he was moved with pity.”[4] He did tap into his inner guide. In the first reading of today, Moses says “Surely this commandment that I am commending you is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. (…) it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”[5] All that is required of us is to be in touch with what’s already in our hearts.

[1] For more about the inner critic see Byron Brown, Soul without Shame. A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, (Boulder: Shambhala, 1999).

[2] Matthew 6. 3

[3] Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love. Meditations for Life, (New York: Image, 1991), p.51

[4] Luke 10. 33

[5] Deuteronomy 30. 11, 14

Reflection for Sunday, June 23, 2019 (Corpus Christi) by John Mark Keyes

Today we celebrate a “feast”, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, or what used to be known as Corpus Christi.

The word “feast” conjures up a lot of eating and drinking, which is singularly appropriate for today’s feast, which focuses on a central element of the Mass we celebrate today and each Sunday: the consecration of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

The Eucharistic Prayer we hear at Mass is inspired by the words Paul reports Jesus saying at the Last Supper: “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. … This is the cup of the new Covenant in my Blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

And to this Paul adds, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.”

You might wonder why our liturgy focuses on eating and drinking. Of all the things Jesus said and did in this life, this action of breaking bread and drinking wine is remembered and proclaimed at every Mass we celebrate.

Why is it not enough to proclaim, hear and contemplate it periodically as we do the other things we read about in the scriptures?

Why is the Eucharist so important that we commemorate it repeatedly each time we gather as a community to worship together?

I have been struck by the fact that the same is not done by many of our Christian co-religionists who celebrate the Eucharist only on special occasions.

To answer this, let’s think about what eating and drinking is generally.

It is most obviously something we do constantly to remain healthy and alive. What we do or do not eat has an enormous impact on our well-being, both in terms of the quality and length of our lives.

But eating also has social significance: when we eat together, we generally converse with one another, we talk about what we are doing or matters that interest us. We share food, but we also share much more in terms of who we are.

But we should perhaps not take this social aspect for granted. Yesterday (Friday) morning I listened to a radio programme on CBC featuring Bee Wilson who has written extensively about food.

She has examined how and what people eat all over the world. She has observed some quite significant changes in eating patterns, including the decline of people eating together.

Apparently, about one-third of all households in the US consist of a single person. When they eat at home, they often eat alone.

And at work, employees tend to take less time to eat during meal breaks, eating at their desks rather than getting out of the workplace and joining others in a meal.

I know this from my own experience. Many years ago, when I began working in a full-time job, I would take quite generous morning coffee breaks with a group of my colleagues. We generally talked about work-related things, so our consciences were not much bothered by the time we took to do this.

After working for some years, I went to teach at the University on an exchange. When I returned after two years, I discovered that the coffee breaks had vanished. There was simply no longer any time given the increasingly hectic pace of the work we were doing.

But of course, all is not lost when it comes to communal eating. One of the wonderful things I like about St. Joe’s is the potluck supper held periodically after the 5:00 PM Mass on Saturdays. We also sometimes have things to eat after the other Masses, for example birthday cake.

It’s a chance to meet people you have not met before and to continue the fellowship of the Mass beyond the liturgy.

Which brings me back to the Eucharist and why we continue to celebrate it at each Mass.

When together we eat and drink the consecrated bread and wine we are recalling Jesus at the Last Supper, on the eve of his crucifixion and death, the central event in his incarnation as a human being.

When we consume them, we are taking them into our bodies together as a group. We each have a piece of the same thing within us in a physical sense.

The distribution of the bread and wine unites us in this very real sense that also underpins the social significance of eating together as something that brings us together into a community.

Thus, our worship is not merely cerebral, not just a matter of intellectual reflection, but also a very physical connection to the God we worship.

The Last Supper was not only a prelude to Jesus’s death and resurrection. It was where Jesus established how the sacrifice of his life was to be linked to our lives.

His death could not be recreated, but it could be memorialized in a ritual of eating and drinking, actions that are essential to living.

And he could become part of us, just as what we eat and drink becomes part of us.

With the Eucharist, we reaffirm our relationship to Jesus by consuming bread and wine just as did his disciples at the Last Supper.

The Last Supper is not the only time in Jesus’s life that eating together figured prominently in what he did. He also attended the wedding at Cana and he was recognized in the breaking of bread on the road to Emmaus.

The gospel of Luke is replete with stories of Jesus eating, with tax collectors and sinners in the house of Levi (5:29-32), in the home of Simon the Pharisee (7:36-50), with Mary and Martha (10:25-42).

And of course, in today’s Gospel we hear Luke’s account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

It takes place after Jesus has addressed the crowds about the Kingdom of God and healed those in need of cures. He realizes it is not enough to talk to them. People also have to eat, and in eating to digest not only some physical nourishment, but perhaps also the spiritual nourishment by talking about what Jesus has said.

It’s not difficult to see why eating plays a central role in the life of Jesus and is so intimately connected to his mission. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is not just in their inexplicable multiplication, it is also in thousands of people sitting down together to partake of the same food.

It is impossible to explain the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, but it fits the pattern of stories about Jesus that take place in the context of people eating together.

It resonates with how he asked to be remembered when we “eat this bread and drink this cup.”