Job and Simon Peter’s Mother-in-Law

Here’s my homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. I thought I’d post it because a lot of people seemed to like it. It’s only about 11 minutes.

Presiders and the “New Missal”

The new translation of the Roman Missal, which will go into effect on the First Sunday of Advent, presents presiders at liturgy with both a significant challenge and a unique opportunity.  These texts, a much more literal translation of the Latin “editio typica” than the one we have been using for nearly forty years, can be a tongue-twisting and even mid-bending challenge to proclaim in English with both meaning and grace.  On the other hand, the language is often beautifully vivid and expressive after the rather pedestrian theological generalities of the translation we’re used to.

Last week I gave a 6-part workshop to priests of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in which we explored some basic principals of liturgy and effective communication that can help us welcome these new texts.  I am convinced that we parish priests do not have to worry too much about how our people accept these “changes.”  They will take the lead form us: if we preside well, they will experience being engaged in and nourished by these texts.  It’s a challenge for us.

The complete set of six talks (about 45 minutes each) may be found on the Internet Archive website.  You can also download the handouts for Tuesday and Wednesday.

I hope you find them helpful.

God and Evil: “Why have you abondoned me?”

Before Mass this morning I read in the LA times that former LA Deputy DA Vincent Bugliosi has come out with a new book in which, after prosecuting bunches of people both in the courtroom and in print, has come up with a new challenge, this time he puts God in trial: “Divinity of Doubt: the God Question.”

It was just released five days ago, and seems highly promoted if the Amazon.com site is any indication.  His argument seems like an old one, and from the Times article and the reviews on Amazon, I can’t see anything new to it. The challenge of trying to reconcile the idea of an all-good God with the immensity of evil in our world necessarily comes up with imperfect and unsatisfying answers.  The real answer is only that all rational categories we use to describe God are limited by our own powers of understanding.  It’s not only that “God has a greater plan,” as some theories maintain, or that God will ultimately reward and punish, but that the mystery of God simply can’t be subject to human concepts.  Our minds are capable of knowing God, but not of comprehending God.

During the reading of the Passion according to St. Matthew this morning, it came home to me that even Jesus could not “rationalize” the Father’s love with his experience of evil.  His struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane was not play-acting, he was indeed arguing with the Father.  His last recorded words in Matthew scream from the ultimate depths of darkness and abandonment, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”

There is no hope of justice, vindication, or redemption in those words; only unrelieved depths of despair.  The supreme irony is this: on the cross there was no redemption.  None.  Just terminal darkness and emptiness.  Just like the Holocaust and the countless repetitions unimaginable tragedy that has been the lot of humankind throughout history, and seems even more immense in today’s world.

Supreme irony gives way to supreme paradox. There was no redemption for Jesus, human and divine, on the cross.  But God, in Jesus, embraces the depths of the human experience of evil; God has taken into himself the reality and consequences of evil, and precisely in that is our redemption as human individuals and the human race. God is not a proposition to be debated, but a mystery to be entered.

Welcome!

I’m starting this new “Pilgrim Shepherd” blog just about a week before leaving for Turkey to lead the fifth Early Christian World Pilgrimage.  I hope to be ore faithful in updating this blog than I was at the previous incarnation of “Pilgrim Shepherd” on Blogspot.  You can still find some good stuff there.  I made the move to WordPress because I’ve become familiar with it — our Good Shepherd Parish website uses it — and it seems both easier and more versatile.

Time for a new look too.  What you see now is the default template, which has a very evocative picture.  I’ll probably keep it for a while, until the content dictates something else.

Whenever I run across something interesting, I plan to post it and comment on it.  Whener something dawns on the that I think may be worth sharing, I’m going to try to express it, even if imperfectly.

None of us possesses the Truth.  As a Catholic Christian, I think it’s much more real to say that the Truth possesses us.  But there are many diverse ways of catching a glimmer of that one Truth.  Exploring and sharing these glimmers as we journey through life is what Pilgrimage is all about.  And we are all Pilgrims, sojourning in a strange and foreign land, seeking the home that Goodness has prepared for us.  Add Beauty as Goodness and Truth coming alive in each other, and we have a kind of metaphor to describe the Trinity, don’t we?

Goodness , Truth, and Beauty — how and where do we find it in our world and beyond our world, in our lives and in one another?

So I hope it will be worth your while to drop by and explore with me now and then.