When I was very young, my mother used to wake me up in the mornings for school. She used to say that I was always smiling when she came in. I can remember vividly the way I felt most days. Life was pretty carefree back then, full of possibilities and promise. I was well cared for, and had a predictable life filled with family and friends. I didn’t articulate it then, but I felt God’s presence in my life, and even if it wasn’t something I would have described as a relationship, it was something I trusted. I had a peace and a confidence in being, believing that things would be ok no matter what. I feel blessed to have had that experience, because it hasn’t stayed the same. Life gets challenging and complicated, and that peace and trust can get eroded. Many days I wake up with a pit of anxiety in my stomach rather than a smile on my face.

I thought about this as I prayed with this Sunday’s gospel. Maybe you remember the story. Jesus is sitting with his friends and looks up to see a large crowd arriving. Knowing already what he was going to do, he asks his friends a really impractical question: “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” The practical friends make their calculations and consider their resources and conclude, maybe with a familiar pit of anxiety in their stomachs, that the situation is impossible. Just when the disciples have pointed out the absurd limitations of their ability to respond, Jesus has them tell the people to recline in preparation for a feast. While thousands look on, Jesus takes the food and prays. John says that Jesus “gave thanks.” He acknowledged that the food he held came from God and belonged to God. Once the child handed it over and Jesus gave thanks over it, it was recognized as God’s food, and it was therefore God’s goodness that the crowd was going to share.

In so many situations, I have let my practical concerns erode my trust and confidence in what God’s power can accomplish. It usually happens when I’m being pragmatic and believe that I need to fix something or solve a problem. When I think the results depend completely on me, my skills and talents seem inadequate and my anxiety increases. When I put this kind of pressure on myself to be the hero, I lose my balance and forget about that presence of God that I felt so surely in less stressful times. I fail to trust that God’s power is always at work.

This doesn’t mean that we can just sit back and wait for God to take care of everything. The miracle in the gospel this week is not explained. We don’t know how it happened. There was suddenly a feast, when there had been so little. It is left as a mystery. What we do know is that God met the needs of the people. God satisfied their hunger, beginning with the generosity of one who apparently had little to offer. How often have I been afraid to act, to make a start at a complicated problem because I felt myself inadequate to the task. These days I have to work so much harder than I did as a child to keep finding that peace and confidence in being that comes from staying in touch with a mysterious relationship with God. But when I do, rather than feeling like it’s all up to me, or that I should wait for some magical solution to appear out of thin air, I can begin to do what I can do, trusting that God is concerned about meeting human needs, and that God can work wonders with what little we have, if we are willing to offer it. With God, inadequacy can be transformed into abundance.

~Fr. Thom

Take your next step: Take some time to recall a specific time in your life when you felt peaceful and confident. Be as specific as you can about the details, and try to remember the feeling. Thank God for that time. Think about a challenge or a stressful situation you are facing. Pray that you can trust in God’s power to multiply the results when you make a start by offering what you can.

This is a great question this week in light of Pope Francis’s encyclical (a document or letter intended for a wide circulation to teach or guide), which you may have heard about. It’s called Laudato Si, which is Italian for “Praise to You.” That’s a quote from Saint Francis’s thirteenth-century Canticle of the Sun, which offers praise to God for creation, and it’s an appropriate title for a teaching about the environment. Without getting into the encyclical, it’s enough to say that the pope is calling for “swift and united global action” to care for our planet. As one might expect from a spiritual leader, Pope Francis expects us to examine the choices we make that affect our environment, as well as our attitude about our relationships with our fellow humans, including future generations. I believe most people have very good intentions about all of this, and yet, as the pope says, “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” Yikes! It seems the pope is trying to provoke us to ask ourselves what God expects of us, which might also prompt us to ask what we expect of God and what we think we deserve from God.

The readings for this coming weekend also invite us to reflect on these questions. The passage from the Gospel of Mark presents two stories, one sandwiched within the other. The author wants us to be aware that the stories are related and that the whole lesson includes both stories. An important man in the community, a synagogue official, has a 12-year-old daughter who is “at the point of death.” As an equal on the social scale, he is free to approach Jesus. He falls at his feet, as a gesture of homage and petition. According to the social code, Jesus would be obligated to help him. That society taught that men of equal status are obligated to do what they can for each other. Even though Jesus’s last reported visit to the synagogue, when he healed on a Sabbath, had resulted in a plot to kill him, this official had faith that Jesus could heal his daughter, and he believed that he deserved this favor from Jesus.

In the middle of this action, an unimportant, nameless woman, who has lost everything, including her social status, due to a 12-year illness, makes the decision to sneak up in the crowd to touch Jesus. She too has faith that Jesus can heal her, but believes she does not deserve to approach Jesus directly to ask for help. Although she probably knows the religious and social ethics that make her an outcast, she also knows the rich wisdom tradition of her faith. She is convinced that the suffering she has endured is not God’s will. What she has heard about Jesus makes her suspect he would agree. She is healed when she touches Jesus, but curing her illness is not enough for Jesus. She deserves more. He seeks her out for a personal encounter so that she can be fully restored to community life.

By this time, after the interruption, the report comes that the official’s daughter has died; it’s too late for Jesus to do anything. The official, who sought the encounter with Jesus, is challenged to take his next step in his faith journey. He didn’t get what he thought he deserved, but Jesus believes he deserves more. His choice to seek help from Jesus will lead him to a deeper experience of God’s love, goodness, and healing power than he thought was possible.

~Fr. Thom

Take your next step: Take some time to reflect on the following questions through journaling or quiet prayer: What choices have you made to seek God’s help in your life? What do you believe you deserve from God? What does God want from you?

Each of us, at one or another point in our life, experiences some challenge or tumult that puts a strain on our faith. Just look at the gospel reading for Sunday: even the disciples who walked in the physical presence of Jesus, who talked with him and questioned him and dared to hope in him as the Messiah, even they questioned, feared, and became uncertain when the sea became violent. In our own lives, the initiating event for fear to surface might be an illness of a child, concern about the loss of a job, watching your spouse become less mentally engaged and less able to figure out solutions to routine problems, or seeing a relationship with a trusted friend disintegrate. These triggers, problems in their own right, can also prompt feelings of isolation and abandonment by God. The question is: “What do we do?”

We can give credence to the feelings of aloneness and helplessness and give up, or we can stake a claim on the promise of God that God will be with us always to the end of time (Mt. 28:20). Focusing on the former choice leads to a dead end and a faltering relationship with Christ. Choosing the latter, investing in faith in God’s promises to us, leads us to peace, wholeness, and a deepening relationship with Christ. Even though there was more than a hint of frustration on Jesus’s part when he asks the disciples, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”, there is also an incredible and very important manifestation of honesty in relationship and trust in Jesus’s willingness to hear their concern when they ask: “Do you not care that we are perishing?”

The development of relationships, any relationship, is marked and shaped by a series of ups and downs, and this is no less true of our relationship with Christ. We delight in the positive events and work our way through the difficult times. The tenacity to stick with it is what enables the relationship not just to survive; but also to thrive, to grow and to deepen. The disciples’ ability to express their consternation gave Jesus the opportunity to assert his power over the storm and, more importantly, to exert influence on the apostles’ faith. We all have the choice to let our fears fester or to rely on the power and compassion of God to embrace us and free us from our fears. Each time we place ourselves in the care of God, in spite of any doubts or concerns we might have, our life in Christ gets stronger. Challenges will continue to come our way, and each time that we choose to trust that God is with us, our relationship with God will deepen.

In the gospel story, Jesus gives no verbal answer to the disciples’ query: “Do you not care?” The answer is in what Jesus does when he stills the turbulent waters and brings about calm. He does care and will continue to show that care when we invest in a trusting relationship with him. Having faith in God is a lifelong process, one that makes our journey through life richer, more peaceful, and more centered. So will you go it alone, or will you walk in the company of Christ?

~Sr. Kathleen

Take your next step:  As a means to create a readiness to trust in God’s goodness, for one week, try praying the following each morning upon waking: “Loving God, be with me throughout this day, leading and guiding me each step I take.” During the day, when you find yourself fearful, ask God: “Release me from the fear and anxiety that threaten to overwhelm me.” And each night, pray: “Thank you for being at my side all the day long.”

This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. Birthday celebrations often seem especially significant or poignant when we are at a turning point in our lives--when we’re about to graduate or have a child or make a big move, or when we are facing a serious illness or grieving a loss. Pentecost this year seems especially poignant and significant because our Church, locally and globally, is at a turning point. Both in our own local community and in the universal Church, through the leadership of Pope Francis, we are asking ourselves some big questions: Why does the Church exist? What is the purpose of the Church? More and more it seems that, although there are many ways of answering these two questions, there are two basic approaches: One is that the Church exists primarily to serve the needs of its members. The other is that the Church exists primarily to reach out to and connect with nonmembers. 

It is essentially a question of priority, not an either/or. Is the faith community’s first responsibility to those who are already within its walls, or to those who are still outside of them? It seems clear that if a church does not address this question in an intentional way, the default position will be to serve the needs of those who are already within the community. As Paulist Fr. Robert Rivers puts it: “The people we need to reach out to are not around to tell us what their needs are. The people who don’t feel welcome aren’t present to tell us why. The poor who don’t feel at home in our church simply remain on the margins.” 

A difficulty arises, in Jesus’s time as in our own, when religious people feel threatened by efforts to reach out to irreligious people. The sentiment often emerges that their gain must be our loss. But in the logic of Christ, we only stand to gain when we share with others the gift of faith that we have been freely given.

On February 15th of this year, Pope Francis gave a homily addressing these two basic possibilities for the essential orientation of the Church, inward and outward. The homily was based on Jesus’s healing of lepers and the way that the authorities often responded to such acts of healing with outrage and suspicion. 

“There are two ways of thinking and of having faith: we can fear to lose the saved and we can want to save the lost. Even today it can happen that we stand at the crossroads of these two ways of thinking. . . .

The way of the Church is precisely to leave her four walls behind and to go out in search of those who are distant, those essentially on the ‘outskirts’ of life. It is to adopt fully God’s own approach, to follow the Master who said: ‘Those who are well have no need of the physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call, not the righteous but sinners’ (Lk 5:31-32).

In healing the leper, Jesus does not harm the healthy. Rather, he frees them from fear. He does not endanger them, but gives them a brother. . . . 

[T]his is the ‘logic,’ the mind of Jesus, and this is the way of the Church. Not only to welcome and reinstate with evangelical courage all those who knock at our door, but to go out and seek, fearlessly and without prejudice, those who are distant, freely sharing what we ourselves freely received.”

Here in the New Roads Catholic Community, we stand at a crossroads, too. What will our priority be? Are we going to be a church that fears to lose the saved, or are we going to be a church that wants to save the lost?

~Rachel

Take your next step: Set aside a few minutes when you can listen to God. Read Luke 15:1-7 (or even just one verse, Luke 15:4--“What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?”) several times, and notice what strikes you about this passage and what feelings emerge in reading it.

During the summer before my last year of seminary, one of my classmates from the Fall River Diocese invited a few of us to spend a week at his parish assignment on Nantucket. I love swimming, and I love the ocean, so I was very eager to go. The south shore beaches there make you feel like you are really out in the middle of the vast ocean and easily lead to pondering infinite mysteries. While swimming one day out there, I remembered my high school swim coach trying to convince me to fill a hole in our roster by swimming backstroke. I resisted because I never felt I could go “all out” in backstroke to reach my full potential. I was afraid, not being able to see where I was going, and thought I would miscount my strokes and crash into the wall or get tangled in the lane lines. Those same fears were present that day as I thought about the life-changing year ahead and how I had no idea what it would be like to be ordained, where I would be assigned, or if I was even on the right path.
 
As I let myself be immersed in the moment of beauty, awe, mystery, and fear, floating on my back in the vast ocean, I began to swim the backstroke, tentatively at first, and then, realizing that I was in a practically limitless body of water with no obstacles in my path, I began to swim “all out.” I felt the most amazing sense of being invited to trust God more deeply, buoyed by the joy of letting go and hearing, or rather, feeling God speak to me, saying, “you are my beloved son.” Although I had no idea where I was going, I knew that I was having an experience that was teaching me that I didn’t need to know. I felt a renewal of my baptism and the companionship of Jesus, who had shared a similar experience and really wanted to help me embrace my life journey with his example and comforting presence to guide me.
 
As we immerse ourselves in this next stretch of time in the Church year, we will be given the opportunity to reflect on how people come to know Jesus. Pope Francis has invited all of us to come to know Jesus in a new way, to have “a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter [us].” For five weeks we will explore together what this means and the steps we can take to make ourselves more open to an encounter with Jesus Christ--an encounter that has the potential to change our lives.
 
This is a great time to recall the gift of our baptism: God’s invitation to know and follow his Beloved Son. Most of us do not recall the baptism that happened when we were infants. We tend to think of baptism only as a ritual lasting a few moments. Actually, baptism is an ongoing immersion in the identity and mystery of Jesus, deepening and bearing fruit over a lifetime. It’s a great time to ask ourselves why we spend our lives chasing after things that fail to satisfy us, when the only thing that will truly satisfy us is Christ. We were created for union with God, and God willed that this union should come about through Christ. I am so grateful for a moment in the ocean that taught me to trust more deeply in God’s desire to help me go “all out” to reach my full potential in union with his Beloved Son.
 
~Fr. Thom
 
Take Your Next Step: What fears hold you back from going “all out”? What causes you to question taking another step in learning about Jesus and deepening your relationship with him? How do you spend your life on things that don’t really satisfy? What will you do this week to immerse yourself more deeply in the gift of your own baptism: God’s invitation to know and follow his Beloved Son?

How do you measure your value as a human being? When we’re filling out an application for a job or for college, we might be asked about our skills, our talents, or the gifts we have that will help us to be successful in a job or a school. Before we even take the risk of applying, we might ask ourselves what we think we can do. High school students are sometimes asked to fill out questionnaires to help counselors and people writing recommendations to summarize their personal and academic strengths and weaknesses in an effort to present a “comprehensive” picture of the individual. Parents are asked to fill out a “brag sheet” to aid the process. The age at which we begin to evaluate ourselves in order to compete well in society gets younger and younger. You can buy your newborn a college t-shirt with their expected year of graduation.

I wonder what effect this constant state of being evaluated has on our lives. Of course it is good to take stock of our lives, celebrate our accomplishments, and reach for greater growth and achievement. But does striving for the competitive advantage in society tend to skew our values in a certain direction and away from others? Does our effort to create a picture of ourselves cause us to lose sight of the real person we are? The gospel this week suggests that we take a look at what real success might mean and how we might accomplish it.

The master in the story who goes away on a trip entrusts his huge fortune to three servants. He trusts them all and believes in their potential. Two of the servants, seemingly unconcerned about how much the others were given, take up the master’s mission, using what they have learned from him and imitating how he goes about his business. They have appropriated his values. They don’t say what they think about him, but their actions show their attitude.

The third servant, perhaps in response to the way he compares himself to the others, wants to have as little as possible to do with his master’s business. The gospel writer lets us know he thinks his master is a hard man who expects results. He is not sure he can deliver, so out of fear, motivated by self-protection, he avoids any risk and goes and buries what the master had invested in him. 

When the master returns, the first two servants can’t wait to show him the fruit of their labors, in effect saying that they had learned from him, and that by allowing them to share in his business venture, faithfully following his way of life, they had become more like him. They share his joy. Sadly, the third is stuck making excuses. He has not come to know his master, hasn’t appreciated what the master offers, and his fear has defined his destiny.

Friends, our God is calling us to a life of abundant joy. Does the “brag sheet” we keep on file in our minds really give the comprehensive picture of us that we want God to see? Does our concern about competing and being evaluated send us in the wrong direction, chasing after things that can never be the source of our joy? Do you sometimes think that you don’t have anything to offer to God? Does your fear of what others or God will think about you cause you to bury God’s investment in you, instead of taking the risks that enable it to grow? The good news is that it’s never too late to take that next step toward sharing the life that only God offers.

~Fr. Thom

Take Your Next Step: 
Take some time to think about how you evaluate yourself. Is it by achievements? What others think of you? How much money you make? The joy you bring to others? Think about what holds you back from taking the next step in growing in faith. What are you afraid of? Ask God to help you overcome your fear, and take one step out of your comfort zone this week. Maybe say hello to someone you’ve never met. Volunteer for something. Celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation (go to confession). Sing at Mass! Share your master’s joy.