Mark 10:45

Tag: Beatitudes

  • Salt and Light

    Salt and Light

    Sunday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

    Isaiah 58:7-10; Matthew 5:13-16

    When I was an altar boy, the lady who watered the plants on the altar complained that the flowers were dying no matter what she did. Father asked if maybe she was over-watering them. She said no; in fact, over the last two weeks she had even started pouring holy water into the soil, but the flowers only got worse. Father looked at her and said, “Please don’t do that. When we bless the water, we put salt in it.”

    Of course, she wouldn’t have seen that. That’s kind of the point of salt; it disappears into other things, changes how they taste or act. As our Lord was implying, we don’t focus on the salt but on the things it’s used in. The same with light; we don’t think about the light itself, but on what it allows us to see or do.

    This brought up two questions in my mind. The first one I asked myself. Who in my life has been salt and light? That is, who has shown me what it means to be the person Jesus talked about last time when he spoke of the beatitudes?

    Several people: My father, who worked without complaint as many hours as he could, as many jobs as he needed, to provide his kids with the Catholic education he never had; blessed are the meek. My mother, who brought her own elderly mother and her disabled brother home to live with us; blessed are the merciful. My wife, who took in an abused, injured baby long after her own children were grown, cut her work hours, and poured her life into getting him the services and therapies he needed; blessed are the single-hearted. My best friend, now deceased, who received an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s yet, when he grieved, did so not for himself but for his wife and children; blessed are those who mourn. And the nun who appeared at our house one day and fed my family with food and good cheer in a time of pain and crisis; blessed are those who hunger.

    If I had said to any of these people, “You know, you really have been the salt of the earth and light of the world for me,” they wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. In fact, I did write a letter to Sister and tell her. She wrote back to me that, if I wanted to see people who had really done something, I should meet the nuns she now lived with; they had built schools, raised money, founded orders. She said, “I have done almost nothing.” The others would’ve said something similar: “What do you think I am, some theologian? I don’t have any great words of wisdom to teach anybody. I’m still working it all out myself!” But God knows what they had forgotten, what we heard from St. Paul: My faith didn’t depend on their wisdom, but on the power of the Holy Spirit working through them. I didn’t need those people to be great theologians, spiritual counselors, or anything else that they weren’t; I needed them to be who God made them to be; to use the talents and abilities he’d already given them. Jesus didn’t say in the gospel that we will be the light of the world or the salt of the earth; he said that we are.

    That brings up the second question: Am I actually being salt and light? Wait; didn’t I just quote Jesus saying that we already are? Yes, but he also said that salt can lose its taste, and light can be hidden. In other words, salt and light don’t have a will or an agenda, they just do what they do. We, on the other hand, can be pretty easily tempted to look for ways to draw attention to ourselves, to show what great and holy people we are. Pretty soon – in fact, on Ash Wednesday, coming up – we’re going to hear Jesus talk about that, and it’s pretty much like dumping salt water into flower pots: He’s going to advise us, in his own way, don’t do that. We have to will to be salt and light for the world, and then do so for the benefit of others.

    OK, how? Well, that depends on our own situation, but in general the outline was given in the first reading. For example, Isaiah urged us to share our bread with the hungry. Is it really that simple – just hand out food to hungry people? Maybe; if you’ve ever been to the food pantry, you know there are a lot of hungry people. But remember too that there are all kinds of hunger: Some for food; others, for someone to listen to them; still others, someone to visit them. The same for shelter, clothing, and all the rest; the list goes on and on. It can be overwhelming, which leads to discouragement, so take the advice of St. Teresa of Calcutta: “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

    In other words, start somewhere. But start; that’s the point. The salt isn’t getting any fresher, the light any brighter, until we put our will, our humility, and our back into it. Then, there is no limit to what salt and light can do; not for our benefit, but, as our Lord said, that others may may see our good deeds and glorify our heavenly Father.

  • Crowd or Disciple?

    Crowd or Disciple?

    The 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Matthew 5:1-12a

    The day finally arrived. After 21 years in school, I made it; the first day of the last class I’d ever have to take. I was excited, but also nervous. I heard this teacher was tough; my friends advised me to wait another year, hoping he’d retire, but I wanted it over with. What was one more tough teacher?

    It took just one class period to rethink that. The first thing this guy did on the first day was hand out the final exam, a series of questions due back in three months. Looking at them made me even more nervous. They didn’t look hard… they looked impossible.

    As always happens, some people dropped. We who decided to stick it out divided up the questions and worked on them. Although I made progress, it became clear that if I was going to give decent answers, I had to go to class and really engage with this teacher.

    That’s where my world lit up. From our first conversation, I could see that psychology wasn’t just a subject to this man; it was his life, his passion, and he wanted us to share it, to love it like he did. In the end, the real importance of giving us those questions was to draw us into conversations with him, to give the benefit of his experience and insight to us, the next generation of psychologists and teachers, so we could better understand and in turn pass on the most important issues in that field to our own future students.

    That is an example of the same purpose our Lord Jesus Christ had when he began his class, the Sermon on the Mount, with his own idea of a final: The beatitudes. Who could blame anyone for finding those hard to understand? We’re blessed to have nothing, to say nothing, and to mourn loved ones? Rejoice when we’re being persecuted? Those don’t seem hard, they seem impossible.

    Of course, they aren’t, but they do require effort. The worst thing we can do is look at them and rule them out as impossible. That’s what St. Paul meant when he mentioned being wise by human standards. No; real wisdom begins with the attitude spoken of by the prophet Zephaniah, the honesty and humility to say, “I don’t understand these,” and the perseverance to say, “But with help, I will.”

    It is virtues like these that set people apart, make them holy. In the first reading we heard about a remnant, a smaller group that emerges from a larger one; people distinguished by their humility and thirst for justice, and rewarded with peace. And we see a shade of it in the gospel, where Matthew begins: When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and… his disciples came to him. So, a large group sees Jesus, a smaller group follows him. The difference? The remnant makes an effort to do it. Each of us has to ask, which am I: Crowd or disciple? Am I satisfied simply hearing about him, or am I committed to following him? We only know that by looking inside ourselves. When and where do I already come to him? Are there circumstances where I will not come to him?

    And what does that mean, to come to him? If I ask God questions, will he answer them? Yes! It is said that when we pray, we talk to God; when we read Scripture, God talks to us. The answers may not be clear, we might have to make an effort to understand, but we have centuries’ worth of resources: Notes on every page of the bible, books by such brilliant thinkers as Benedict XVI. In our own parish, we have priests and deacons who have been trained to help you understand where and how God is moving and speaking in your life.

    This is where your world can light up, too. Studying the beatitudes this way leads us to contemplation, where we learn these aren’t just some nice, pious thoughts to live by; they are a portrait of Christ. Poverty of spirit; who is more humble than he who emptied himself and took the form of a slave? Who has mourned more than he, who wept over Jerusalem? Who is meeker or gentler than the Lamb of God, led to slaughter without a word? Who seeks righteousness more than he who looked upon mankind from the cross and said, “I thirst”? Who was ever more merciful than he who said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” or more pure of heart than he whose heart was pierced for love of us? These are the kind of meditations that bring us closer to the heart of Jesus, and lead us to see that even on that mount of the beatitudes, our Lord had another mountain in mind; the one he had come to climb for the salvation of the world.

    This is just one example. All of Scripture is open to you; God is there, waiting for you to come to him as the disciples did on that mountain, to be drawn into conversation, gain the insight he has in store, so that you can better understand and in turn pass on all that you have learned, so that others may come to know and love him as you do.