Journal of Sr. Carla Mae Streeter, O.P.

Lent
This Wednesday we enter the season of lent (springtime) as God’s people. Soon folks will be noticing the film on windows, wanting to dust down cobwebs, and wash all the bedding. We call it spring cleaning. As forgiven sinners we remember during this season that there is another kind of “crud.” It’s the residue from our sinning that still hangs in the air, sometimes causing intense suffering (for which God is blamed). It’s true, we’ve been forgiven, the One who loves us has taken our sin on himself. But the repair work still needs to be done. The damage is all around us. When you wreck the car you can say sorry and be forgiven, but the body work still needs doing.

Penance is our way of doing the body work. Like a rich fragrant detergent, penance dissolves grease and smudge, and washes it away. It’s our part of total forgiveness.

Prayer
So maybe we can be more intentional about remembering in our prayer those we love or those who anger us during lent. Like some marvelous air purifier, prayer absorbs the crud, freshening the atmosphere. Maybe there is someone in our family who thinks their badness is greater than God’s mercy (duh!). Surround them with your prayer, so that their resistance is gradually dissolved like stubborn scum.

Maybe it’s time …to reflect on and renew our marriage commitment…to ponder our baptismal promises…

Fasting
Why on earth would we deprive ourselves of food to honor God? Good question. Catholics 21 to 59 are asked to fast as penance. So we need to ask how this might help to “clean up the crud.” Eating one full meal a day and two little snacks is not exactly deprivation. Most healthy folks can do it even beyond age 59. But why? Physical fasting like no other thing makes us feel empty…like we need something. It makes space. We are called to make loving space…for God, for people we have been avoiding, for people we love and need to pay more attention to. For those who can’t physically fast, there is always psychic fasting…from resentment, from anger, from envy, from jealousy, from revenge. Fasting is like the vacuum cleaner at work, sucking crud into its safe disposable space.

Almsgiving
We are very blessed people, even in the face of the recession. Without even thinking, our fists can get pretty tight around the resources we have. We need to open our fists so we can use what we need and give the rest to those around us who need our help. Maybe you are going to put out a special jar or bowl during lent. It will be your “begging bowl.” Into it you will regularly toss all your change during lent. Maybe you are going to cut out a certain food treat you love, and toss the cost into the jar. You decide how you are going to intentionally open your fist.

Widows are “little” people. The Word of God for this November 8 Sunday is all about widows. Or is it?

The harvest is in, the liturgical year is coming to a close. The Church seems to be looking at end time out of the corner of its eye. So what’s with these “little” people, the widows?

In Jesus’ day, no adult was more helpless and vulnerable than a widow. She had no one to “belong” to…she was on her own. There was no male protection, no protective infrastructure, no social security. Jesus couldn’t have chosen a more apt image of poverty.

The gospel acclamation once again offers us the beatitude, “Blest are the poor of spirit…” and the  middle reading almost paints Jesus as a bridge, providing salvation because he has his feet firmly planted in our world in his sacred humanity, and his hands reaching for the sky, and his Father. We mount the “bridge” in his sacred humanity which is our own, and travel straight into the heart of God.

So I suspect there is something for us here more than widows. I suspect we’re being told that we get ready for death by realizing that we don’t have means…not even a fist of flour or a little oil. We have nothing we have not received from the One who has given us life itself. So all we have is our little two-cents’ worth. And that is all God asks.

The poor of spirit have room for God. They have space for the promise to produce, like the harvest, and the littleness never runs out. Like some big-armed papa, the great God swoops us up in our dying and treasures our two-cents’ worth. It is knowing our “littleness” that enables us to run across that bridge and jump into those arms.

The Obedience of Those in the Ministry of Congregational Leadership

All religious take a vow of obediential listening. This puts them in the posture of having an open contemplative heart. To whom will they listen? Those not in office know that they listen to God, to one another, and above all to those they have elected into leadership to influence them.

But what about those in the office of leadership in the congregation? They too have a vow of obedience. To whom do they listen?
First, they have listened to the call of the community to assume elected office. They listen to God in prayer to discern the day to day decisions that are part of their ministry. But a large part of their service is the listening to the women or men who have elected them into office, and who expect them to lead. How can these leaders be obedient, how can they in their turn listen with a contemplative heart, if they are not given the facts, if they are not attentive to the stories, if they are not hearing between the lines of written communications, if they are not given what they need to hear by the very persons who have called them into office?

It is the responsibility then, of all of us in congregational living to provide our elected leadership with the honest information they need to hear. Without it, they are blind, and we hinder them from joining us in exercizing their vow, the vow they share with us as together we have pledged to have a listening heart.

Ministry: Getting Back to Basics

There is much discussion in the present life of the Church about ministry: the ministry of priests, of religious, and of the laity in the Church. We spend much time discerning who should do what and why.

But at the heart of the ministry question is a simple act that is the ground of this conversation. The gospel shows us the Lord of All bending down and washing feet. He then simple tells us that that is what it is all about. In our world of status and white privilege, of class systems and prestige, we blink and so often lose sight of this basic understanding. We may minister to the imprisoned. We may educate. We may find our day filled with doing finance. We may be working on further education. Going back to this core image, we learn that some minister with their hands, some with their words, and some with their brains. All without exception is a form of foot washing or it can lapse easily into some form of self-aggrandizement. Ministry, be it done by the most highly educated among us or those with limited education, is a form of foot-washing. We simply have different “towels” and some of them have monograms on them, indicating where we learned how to bend to the needs of another.

Ideology? “The unexamined ideology in the stem-cell debate is the promise of scientific progress.” This statement from the editors of America (Current Comment, March 30, 2009) bounces the “ideology” ball into the scienctific court. The above statement was triggered by the ambiguity of the recent Obama statement that the stem cell discussion must be based on “…science not ideology.”

The editors go on to remind the readers that because pluripotent stem cells can now be produced from adult cells, it is not at all clear what embrionic stem cell research can offer us beyond hopes supported by guesses (See Fetal Stem Cells Trigger Tumors… Associated Press, February 17, 2009). The bottom line
is a caution against hype. Embryonic stem cells can be the latest in a series of super-cures being hyped to the American public.

Faith bases its conviction on the accumulated experience of a community. It is not ideology as long as it remains open to truth. Science bases its hypotheses upon empirically observed data. It too must always remain open to truth to avoid ideology.

Mr. President, you are right in trying to correct the politicization of science under the Bush administration. But you are wrong to present the lifting of the restriction on stem-cell research of your predecessor as freeing science from politics. Both the Bush and Clinton policies were arbitrary political compromises, say the editors, for which there was no coherent moral defense.

Recent events prod us into thought. We’ve sharpened our awareness of the complexities of these issues. For us truth is always in, ideology is out.

The time is approaching. We will all exercise one of the most sacred rights of a free people. We will vote to elect our national leadership.

In light of this awesome responsibility, I find myself reflecting again on some important distinctions. We have been founded as a nation on liberty, the freedom that allows each of us to become all we can be, the freedom that creates a space or state of being that allows us to realize ourselves to the full.

This is indeed a blessing, and was named such by our founding fathers. So freedom is a climate where free choice can choose the good, the true, the beautiful. It is the milieu where humans can become truly human.

The means to this becoming is freedom of choice. We need to decide what we shall be by what we do. By our freedom of choice we realize and create a true state of freedom.

But there is a fly in the ointment. Free choice can also be used to stomp all over your newly planted front lawn. It can be used to rob you of your life savings. It can be used to destroy a fetus.

At this sacred time of elections I suggest we Americans  clean up our muddled use of these terms. Freedom as envisioned by our founding fathers is a state of being where human beings flourish. Free choice needs to be regulated by law, for its use has the power to destroy the very freedom for which we became a nation.

To equate freedom and free choice puts us on the pathway to that very danger. In such a blurring, whatever hampers my free choice violates my God-given freedom. Not so. When my judgment is such that I think I can take your life (or that of the unborn) by an exercise of my free choice, then we need to pause and ask whether this makes us more truly human, more truly free. Or does it lead to that slippery slope of anarchy, where I do what I want when I want, and you don’t dare reign me in? What am I using my free choice for?

We are a great nation. We deserve better than verbal valium.

Hidden in the last days of the Second Vatican Council is a jewel. If asked what the Council had to say about the Church, readers point to Lumen gentium. Here professors and students alike will find the Church’s reflection on her own inner life. But precious as this is, it is not the jewel. There is a second document on the Church, written almost as an afterthought. Approved just as the Council was coming to a close, Gaudium et spes slipped in the door at the last moment, shaped by bishops who were convinced of its importance all through the Council. The Church must be understood not only in itself, they argued. It must be understood in its relation to the world. In its English title, The Church in the Modern World, we immediately sense this outward thrust.

I suggest we are at a point in history that gives us the opportunity to view the Church as it has evolved. Joseph Holland of the Center of Concern inWashington D.C. offers us three stages in this development. We might describe the medieval Church as Christ on the offense. By this I mean the Church in its golden age, a time when its influence was felt everywhere. It presence was felt politically and socially. Its power was unmistakeable.  Its image is the Christ Pantocrator, the regal stern Christ surrounded by angels and holding the earth in his hands. With the Enlightenment and the rise of rationalism we find the Church as Christ on the defense. Maligned and insulted, robbed of its property and ridiculed in its beliefs, its image is the crucified. With the Council we sense yet a third stage of development. It is the Church as servant of the nations. The image is that of the foot-washing Christ, bent over the resistant Peter, armed only with towel and basin.

After the age of colonization, we are still learning how to be a Church in the world, a community with, in, and among the nations of the world so hungry for truth and compassion. This is a Church that dialogues to the point of dialectic…to the point of real and honest difference. This is a Church that listens as well as speaks, to the stories of faith of those very different from itself. This is the Church that meets with scientists, with doctors, with politicians, with economists. This is the Church of the towel and basin, the Church, in its great dignity, on bended knee. The Church is that part of the world that has gone public in its commitment to following the Jesus of the towel and the basin.

We celebrated the feast of St. Bernard on August 20.  He had a special love for the Mother of God.  I found myself reflecting a bit on one of his writings about her, and so I add my own musings…

What does the grace of Preaching mean today?