Category Archives: Family Spirituality

In light of Pope Francis’ death, those who’ve seen the movie “Conclave” might remember the homily given by Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, to cardinals assembled for the new pope’s election. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of unity. If there were only certainty, there’d be no mystery and no need for faith. Let’s elect a pope who doubts.” St. Thomas would’ve approved.

Where we might have expected glory and trumpets the first Sunday after Easter, instead we get typical, honest, human groping towards truth. A splendid reunion between Jesus and his friends? Not quite. But maybe something better: Jesus’ mercy, meeting them where they (and we) are stumbling, extending his hand in genuine understanding and compassion.

Despite the fact that it has been celebrated for centuries, the quality of mercy remains an abstraction. Today, Jesus gives mercy a human face and touch.

Before we criticize Thomas too much, we should ask what we might do in a similar situation. Would we also be skeptical if our friends told us that someone had returned from death? Wouldn’t we want to see for ourselves? Thomas may simply voice the questions most disciples harbor secretly.

The first disciples, caught in fear and confusion, are hardly the finest spokespersons for the gospel. But then, neither are we. We have the same mixture of doubt and certainty, anxiety and joy that they had.

Jesus responds to us as he did to Thomas—without harsh judgment. He understands our needs for concrete reassurance. After all, God created us with five senses to help us learn. And if Thomas—stubbornly insistent on tangible proof—can believe, maybe there’s hope for us all.

To us as to him, Jesus extends the same merciful invitation: “touch me and see.” Only by coming dangerously close to this wounded Lord will we know transformation of our wounds—and resurrection. Doubt isn’t evil: it’s the entryway to hope.

In chilly, dark December, we sing with gusto, “Oh we need a little Christmas, right this very minute. Need a little Christmas now!” Maybe this year, we should echo, “We need a little Easter, now!”

With each day’s news bringing another crushing assault on our democracy, and every new headline describing major, cruel policy shifts we never voted on, let’s try to turn our thoughts to Resurrection.

We have a preview in the parable of the prodigal son where the phrase “he got up” or “he has come to life again” recurs four times. The deliberate repetition leads us to ask, “where do we rise up?” At a certain age, simply getting out of bed in the morning is a triumphant act of courage. And if we uplift our attitudes, we learn to think of the day not as “what drudgery must I do?” but “what awesome surprises does this hold? What gifts does God have in store today?”

Surely the tender, tiny leaves emerging on trees sing of new life. As Thomas Merton wrote in When the Trees Say Nothing, “beech leaves are the loveliest things in creation when they are just unfolding.” Other small signals call us to hope in the larger arena: the spark in a substantive conversation, the surprise call or e-mail, the shared understanding that sometimes comes without words.  The delayed, reluctant reader sounds out the first word, and the women find the tomb empty. From a group of unruly, distracted middle schoolers, a choir director coaxes beautiful song; Mary hears her name in familiar tones.
 

A contemporary death-to-life story is told in “Blink,” a touching National Geographic documentary streaming on Disney +. A family in Montreal learns that 3 of their 4 children will gradually go blind. The mother recounts with painfully honesty how she rushed online to research the condition, reading there, “no cure.” With considerable bravery and luck, the parents set out on a world-wide tour to give the children visual memories, images they can store in their mental banks when their vision is gone. A safari in Africa, a trek through the Himalayas in Nepal, rides on camels in Egypt, a zip line through the rain forest in Ecuador—everything on the family bucket list gets checked and experienced.

Even the frustrating parts of the journey are recorded—squabbles, getting stuck on an aerial gondola in Ecuador for 9 hours, fatigue, cold rain and sad, encroaching signs like loss of night vision. But the joy is evident and the resurrection continues in a quieter vein when they return home and learn to navigate with seeing eye dogs.

As Jim Finley says on his podcast, “Turning to the Mystics,” Jesus always approaches people who are caught in something unresolved. He sees beyond the current impasse to what endures: God’s infinite love for God’s child. Post-resurrection, that continues with the disciples walking towards Emmaus. The hallmark of an Easter people is always joy, because as theologian Karl Rahner says, “If they can take it away, it’s not God.”  

Sometimes it helps to see parallels between the passion narratives and our daily experience where we find many kinds of Eucharist. At the grocery store recently, choosing the wrong check-out line as always, I wound up behind a customer who engaged the clerk in a lengthy discussion of measles. Every symptom from childhood on was discussed at great length. By the time we hit “my sister at age 5,” I glanced at the guy behind me.

Big, young and sweetly shy, he had a beautiful assortment of flowers in his grocery cart, which I complimented. “Odd assortment of groceries, huh?” he responded. Along with the flowers were many small packets of jello and rice pudding. “I work at a nursing home,” he explained. “We’ll put a flower on each lunch tray.” “And jello will be a treat!” I finished. As the conversation ahead turned to dog diseases, I was grinning at “a cart full of jello and joy.”  

Like Eucharist, Christ’s Good Friday continues in the suffering of the Mystical Body. The pain inflicted on Jesus gives us a framework to hold the current cruelty of the U.S. government. When Trump and Musk ended the U.S. Agency for International Development, probably illegally, reporter Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times traveled through East Africa and reported on the devastating, preventable deaths that have already resulted. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html?campaign_id=45&emc=edit_nk_20250317&instance_id=150222&nl=nicholas-kristof&regi_id=73769963&segment_id=193680&user_id=2a4e71af79d7b498d29e2d0c1faa1e7d)

Kristof’s clear, dramatic diagrams show the heartbreaking numbers who will die without the medicine and health workers the U.S. once funded. And how much money will the billionaire’s cuts save, presumably for his rich cronies? “The cost of first-line H.I.V. medications to keep a person alive is less than 12 cents a day.” Joseph was betrayed by his brothers for 20 pieces of silver and Jesus by Judas for 30…

No logic can explain it. No words can wrap around the bottomless grief of a mother losing her child in S. Sudan, or Mary’s at the crucifixion. The eyes of faith can turn only to the broken bones and bloodied hands of One who suffers in innocent orphans and desperately ill, malnourished people. He is with us in our worst brokenness. Thomas Merton once wrote about his younger brother’s death in war: “and in the wreckage of your April, Christ lies slain.”

Questions are unanswerable, but One goes before us who shares the agony. And those with a conscience, those who celebrate Holy Week must answer Kristof’s challenge (3/19): “pulling back aid… largely silent about the world’s worst humanitarian crisis… comes painfully close to complicity.”

(John 11:1-45)

Today, she’d be the CEO of Google or Apple. Brilliant, outspoken, direct, she gave Jesus exactly the affirmation he needed to proceed to Jerusalem and his passion. But let Martha tell the story…

“I was at my worst then: exhausted, vulnerable, grieving for Lazarus, angry at Jesus. I was so outraged, I spewed pure venom when he arrived. Lazarus’s place at our table was empty, the brother I loved had vanished, and Jesus’ delay became the target for my fury.

People with better social skills might have welcomed him with, ‘Thanks for trying,’ or even, ‘Your friend is dead,’ but I dumped the guilt trip on him: ‘If you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.’

The accusation hurt; I could tell by the sadness in his eyes. Still it didn’t paralyze him; maybe he continued our conversation because he could trust I wouldn’t mask the truth. I would look him straight in the eye and speak without a shred of syrupy politeness.

Still, he hesitated. It was as if he needed something from me, some mysterious affirmation before he plunged ahead. The roles were reversed: just when I needed to lean on him in grief, he asked for my support!

Even if I’d lost Lazarus, I could still encourage Jesus. Maybe he had taught me how to give people exactly what they need. He had wept with Mary; he had discussed the afterlife with me; now it was my turn to answer the question he hated to ask. So few people understood him; all he wanted was one person to show some inkling.

And I did know who he was. In some quiet, sure place within, I was bedrock certain of his identity. So I said it aloud. Not to sound arrogant, but Jesus forged into that foul-smelling tomb as if propelled by my words. I ran after him, just in time to see Lazarus lurch forth. Three days before, weeping, I had covered my brother’s face with the same linen. Now, I unwound the burial cloths as if unwrapping a splendid gift.

I barely thanked Jesus or noticed him leave. But neighbors said he walked purposefully toward Jerusalem, driven as he had been to Lazarus’s grave. Did my words still echo in his ears? Had I ignited some fire within him? As I had a hundred times before, I asked myself, ‘Now what have I said?’”

Excerpted from Hidden Women of the Gospels by Kathy Coffey, Orbis Books, orbisbooks.com, 800-258-5838

Scripture scholar Thomas Brodie writes of the man born blind: His first words, ”ego eimi” mean literally, “I am.” But there’s more to this than a simple self-identification. They also place him in line with God’s self-definition in the Hebrew scripture, “I am who am,” and Jesus’ string of identifiers elsewhere in John: I am the bread of life (6:35) and light of the world. This spunky, uneducated man represents us all, made in God’s image. (The Gospel According to John New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 55.)

Furthermore, the formerly blind man models how to trust. He’s so grateful to Jesus he believes him completely, and bows in reverence to him. He may not have read anything, but he stands in sharp contrast to those who may be more educated, still desperately clinging to a tired tradition. Their blindness keeps them from seeing how awesomely God works in the present.

We shouldn’t pick on them when we all have our blind spots, and what follows may be mine. This Lent is pervaded by news of crushingly inhumane federal policies which benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. It’s the kind of gross injustice the Hebrew prophets railed against, and they didn’t even have our expectations of democracy, a system rooted in the consent of the governed.

When did we the governed agree to freeze funding for Jesuit Refugee Service’s life-saving work of—just one example–providing medicine, food, shelter and services for children with disabilities? Or agree to stiffing the Catholic bishops for $13 million worth of care provided before Jan. 24 to resettle refugees who are in the U.S. legally? When did we vote to treat Canada as enemy and Putin as ally? A major foreign policy shift, and we had no say?

To avoid closing with pessimism, two examples of clear seeing: first, a film streaming on Amazon, “Becoming Katherine Graham.” During previous crises, this woman who was totally unprepared to take on running The Washington Post made the brave decisions to publish the Pentagon Papers, revealing the disaster unfolding in Vietnam, and to uncover the Watergate fraud which eventually led to Nixon’s resignation. At stake was the first amendment, which will sound familiar to those following the controversy about the AP refusing to conform to “Gulf of America” and being punished with no access to the oval office. (Nixon used the same strategy.)

The second clear clarion: when Trump threatened Georgetown Law about eliminating all DEI, Dean Treanor responded and didn’t hold back: “Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.”

Blindness and insight take different forms, but have characterized humanity since biblical times.

The Genius of Jesus, The World of Women–Kathy Coffey

Day of Prayer, Sat. April 5

St. Thomas More Parish, Manhattan, KS

$55

8:30-3:30

900 Kimball Ave, Manhattan, KS 66502 | 785-776-5151 | stm@stmmanhattan.com

She just wants to fill her bucket and get home before it gets any hotter. The encounter which changes her life comes in the ordinary drudgery—at the well, not the synagogue; in the office, not the church; in the kitchen, not the temple. Almost like finding enlightenment in the frozen food aisle.

But Jesus welcomes desire at the well, indeed, considers it even more important than his own drink. Both the woman and Jesus find so much joy in their conversation, they forget the concerns that brought them here in the first place. He never gets his drink; she abandons her jar. But their deep yearnings meet.

As John Main writes in Word Into Silence, “The consuming desire of Jesus [is] to flood [us] with His Spirit.” (p. 46) Or to give “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” She’s plucky enough to believe him. She responds to a promise, never seeing this miraculous water nor feeling it spill down her sleeves. Maybe she likes his style: to call, never coerce.

Curious how we might respond? Main, says, “numbed by the extravagance of … New Testament claims… we … tone them down in safe theological formulae.” (p. 44) The woman no longer skulks alone and anonymous to the well at noon, when no one else is there. She blazes into the village like a brass band, eager to speak her truth. Newly come to voice, she snags people, holds them in the hollow of her hand.

The Samaritan woman is a model to us all of how to befriend our longing and move towards trust. Her water jar, symbol of domestic duty, is left in the dust. She herself becomes the vessel for the best news anyone could hear.

As some this weekend read the story of Jesus’ transfiguration into radiant light, it’s a good time to think about our own transformations. As people move from child to teen to adult, some to spouse/partner, parent or grandparent, the really important and interesting transformations occur within. Gradually, we come to see ourselves and believe more in our identity as image of God. Ram Dass describes the transformation into a wise elder, “We move from role to soul.” The ego identities as teacher/caretaker/attorney/ doctor/chef/Democrat/Republican fade. Then we see as the mystic St. Catherine of Genoa did, “My me is God.”

Who I am in God, my true identity is indestructible. All else passes away as I become “the very goodness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Of course humans still fail, but we get better at holding the paradoxes: we are both time-bound and eternal, empty and full, partial and complete, often wrong and radically OK.

Some balk when they hear of their own deep goodness. But Rutger Bregman in Humankind presents a compelling case that as Anne Frank said, “In spite of everything… people are truly good at heart.” For instance, he sees Lord of the Flies, a novel which details how boys abandoned on an island destroy each other more as a reflection of the author William Golding’s personal outlook than as reality. Golding was depressed, alcoholic, and unhappy. Yet his fiction was a hit, and gave many a harshly negative view of human nature.

But Bregman finds a real-life case: six boys marooned on an island for over a year, rescued by an Australian sea captain.  Their true story is heartening: they began and ended each day with song and prayer, tended a fire that never went out, collected rainwater in hollow tree trunks, planted a garden, set up sports, and resolved quarrels by giving participants time-outs. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island and cool down. They suffered storms, terrible thirst, and one boy’s broken leg, but emerged as friends, in fine physical shape.

One isolated incident? Hardly. Bregman cites long-range statistics that show life improving for humanity. Most infectious diseases eradicated, slavery abolished, people living in extreme poverty under 10%. In the Middle Ages, 12% of the European and Asian populations died violent deaths. But in the last 100 years, that figure has gone down to 1.3% world-wide. Of course we face ecological crisis, but Bergman believes, “there’s no need to be fatalistic about civil society.”

During the London Blitz and the retaliatory bombing of Germany, a strange serenity pervaded despite the grief and destruction. Public mental health actually improved in Britain and in Germany, “there was no evidence of breakdown of morale.” Military experts still haven’t caught on; Putin’s heartbreaking bombing of the Ukraine seems to have only strengthened the peoples’ resolve. And Israel’s wildly disproportionate killing of civilians (many children) in Gaza has made many people question the righteousness of their cause.

Bregman doesn’t skirt the toughest examples, but presents angles on them we may not have seen before. My friends and family know that my personality type is idealistic; maybe I’m just reading what I want to find. But I keep returning to the astonishingly good news of the gospel: “Make your home in me as I make mine in you.” “Whoever receives one of these little ones receives me”—over and over, God’s identification with muddled, mistaken humanity. Sadly, the Christian message has been used to scold and shame, bludgeon and bully. Perhaps the ultimate bottom line is, can we believe awesome news?

This season for Christians, as for other traditions that take time to repent, marks a turning point. From what to what? Jesus didn’t know or use the word “sin,” which wasn’t part of the Hebrew construct. But he clearly understood the context of anything less than the fullness of what God wants us to become.

So he says, “Turn from all that drags you down.” Are we haunted by worries about the future or shame about the past? Are we still angry about something that happened years ago? Lent means springtime: it presents us with the opportunity to slough off like a snakeskin all that deadens. Instead, we turn to the God who made us, who redeemed us and who lives in us.

Just as Jesus would say “the Prince of this world has no hold on me,” so we belong to God, not to all that threatens. If we over-identify with our emotions, achievements, children, work or ideas, we risk being in bondage to one sector of our lives, out of balance as a whole person. Instead, Jesus invites us to belong completely to him, with all we are. The only door into the future is trust. God who has been faithful before can be trusted again. Can we step towards that life source this Lent?

Some gospel accounts of Jesus’ temptations end with the phrase, “and angels waited on him.” After a dreadful ordeal, when Jesus is hungry and probably exhausted, the presence of the divine is somehow still with him. It is possible that angels attend all our lonely desert places. Where we sense the least comfort, there it abounds. Perhaps it’s a relationship, health or job issue, looming decision. And how have light wings touched us today? Through kind friends, relatives who don’t tire of our cranky moods or repeated stories, a satisfying meal, a lovely sunset, good news, books, movies or films?

Ever tire of the incessant chatter in the head, the mind endlessly repeating the same loops, often needlessly fearful, envious or worried about stuff that never comes to pass? In her book Unbinding, Kathleen Singh compares these thoughts to a gang of thugs, robbing us of our truest selves, who live deeply in peace with God.

Sometimes it helps to step lightly into another tradition, in this case the Buddhist. In previous books like The Grace in Living, the Grace in Aging and The Grace in Dying, Singh has been a splendid, accessible guide, often quoting the best of the Christian mystical tradition too. St. Bonaventure, for instance reminds us that we can’t view things truly unless we see “how God shines forth in them.” (p. 8) St. Teresa of Avila asks whether we pray “as if God were not present.” (p. 99) Or do we live as if God were not present?

At some level, we know that every breath is given by God, that our exquisitely designed bodies and minds are animated by God. Yet we continue to churn out a stream of anxieties (“What if I’m late? What if she doesn’t like me? Did he just look funny at me?”) as though we weren’t deeply grounded in the divine. Singh uses the word “grace” as an ecumenical reference to God or the sacred, the Great Mystery to which words can only point. Sadly we allow habitual thought patterns to create a constant illusion of separateness from this living, pulsing Source.

I cringed to recognize how I sometimes resort to blind habits—I dislike this person who reminds me of someone who mistreated me in third grade—hence “allowing some fairly untrustworthy drivers to take the wheel” (p. 117). Furthermore, crystallized thought modes prevent our seeing creatively with wonder, freshness and delight. “Bin there, done that,” we may grumble when a new opportunity presents itself. Singh compares that constricted attention to living in a house with no windows (p. 105).

Singh poses two questions that, if we pause and ask them often enough, may help move us past the mental assumptions. First, “what is really going on here?” Am I craving something I think will make me blissfully happy, even when it’s fantasy, ignoring the happiness of right here and now? Does the craving mask the longing for the divine? And, “Who is looking now, grace or self?” The “small tight knot of self” keeps us distant from grace, our birthright and delight. Just as we grow disenchanted with small talk and malls, we gradually recognize the awe and joy of “a beautiful, improvisational dance with the sacred,” free of ego’s controlling machinations—and control itself is an illusion.

Such a brief review barely does justice to a complex and compelling work. Interestingly, Singh completed this book shortly before her death—so she knew first-hand about letting go of the self’s puppet dictatorship, as we all must do in the end.

In the hilly neighborhood around our home, radio reception is spotty. So often I’ll get a surge of Mozart followed by a news clip: “USAID funds cut,” then a swirl of Vivaldi and “World’s Richest Man Stops Feeding World’s Poorest Children.” It’s enough to make one’s head spin, but may be an accurate reflection of the world in which we live.

So, with dizzying channels probably due to my tech incompetence, I was driving to an Oakland elementary school where I’d volunteered to read for Black History Month, one small step to combat racism. It’s a delight to see the welcoming committee of spit-and polished fifth graders, hear first graders correctly identify Rosa Parks, and when asked what this month meant, admire the beaming response of a kindergartener: “It celebrates US!”

One of the books for older children was Above the Rim, How Elgin Baylor Changed Basketball by Jen Bryant. Beyond Baylor’s formidable athletic prowess, he led a revolution which the book parallels to students training to integrate the schools and lunch counters of the south nonviolently. The Lakers team, touring West Virginia in 1959, found “Whites Only” signs at restaurants and hotels. To their credit, they refused to stay or eat in places that wouldn’t admit Elgin, their team member. The fifth graders and I agreed that our favorite scene was Elgin sitting on the bench at a game, wearing white shirt, tie, and dress slacks.

Fans who’d paid to see the game were grumbling that they wouldn’t see his famous shots, but he replied, “I’ll suit up and play when you treat me like a human being.” Newspapers and the NBA took note, quickly creating a policy that teams wouldn’t stay in hotels that discriminated. I cheered the success of that movement, then looked for parallels today. We can play two channels simultaneously in terms of time, too, our own era starting to sound like Baylor’s. The issue is the same: the dignity the Creator gives every human, and the current official contempt for human rights.

But resistance is bold: for instance, Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego who will soon move to DC, (the pope who appointed him must have a sense of humor—or justice) decrying the White House crackdown on undocumented immigrants: “We must speak up and proclaim that this unfolding misery and suffering and, yes, war of fear and terror cannot be tolerated in our midst.” “We must speak up and say: ‘Go no farther’ because the safety … humanity of our brothers and sisters, who are being targeted, are too precious in our eyes and in God’s eyes.”

On February 11, Pope Francis, who rarely engages in national affairs, weighed in to support the U.S. bishops, reminding everyone that Jesus, too was exiled, fleeing to a foreign land and another culture, his life in jeopardy. “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” the pope wrote. 

On another topic, Alistair Dutton, secretary general of Caritas Internationalis, head of the Catholic Church’s global charity arm said: the decision to gut foreign aid is “reckless” and will likely “kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanizing poverty.” “This is an unhuman affront to people’s God-given human dignity, that will cause immense suffering.” To the billionaire making these cuts, foreign aid — which makes up less than 1% of the annual federal budget–must look like chump change.

Two themes interplaying with McElroy, Pope Francis and Dutton sounding like Mozart and Vivaldi. In every era, the light and dark mix—and one hopes desperately, more voices like theirs and Elgin Baylor’s will protest loud and clear. As this is written, it’s unclear how the courts’ intervention will affect the power grab, but sounding direct and forceful as Beethoven, Judge John Coughenour of Washington responded emphatically to the attempt to end birthright citizenship, enshrined in the 14^th amendment. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, and this is a blatantly unconstitutional order.” Amen!