Kathy Coffey

Every Easter, I try to post a story about resurrection because when the news is dreary, we need positive, uplifting buoyancy. Here’s a remarkable one I’d never heard. The research left me teary: see for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ2vcCJ-UII, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhkxQEzSR7Q, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlapEAWWDQc, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVaKXr87sQE

To summarize:

Between 1831 and 1833, around 20,000 Choctaw people were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma from their ancestral lands in present-day Mississippi and Alabama. Historians estimate that 4,000 died along the way, which has aptly been named the Trail of Tears. (Smithsonian Magazine)

Only 16 years later, still recovering from the trauma, they heard about the Irish Potato Famine. One commentator named it “a familiar heartache”—most of the food grown in Ireland was exported by the English under military guard as the starving Irish watched, their diet of potatoes wiped out by disease.

The Irish population in 1845 was 7 million—then 2 million either died in the famine or emigrated. The suffering struck a chord with people 4,000 miles away who had suffered terrible deprivation themselves and had little money. But the Choctaw of Skullyville, Oklahoma, donated $170, funds distributed by the Quakers, which would amount to over 5,000 in today’s dollars. The bond of shared oppression was intense.

In 2020, 173 years after the original donation, the Navajo and Hopi tribes were devastated by the pandemic. They had the highest rates of COVID-19 in the US, outside of New York and New Jersey. As one news commentator pointed out, the constant injunctions to wash hands were meaningless when 1/3 of the people had no running water. A native news anchor said “we’re almost invisible in the U.S.,” but the Irish came through—donating over $5 million for food, water and supplies. The donations from Irish people were accompanied by touching messages: “the favour is returned!”  “You helped us in our darkest hour. Honoured to return the kindness. Ireland remembers, with thanks.” “You helped us when no one else did.”

Connections continue. In 1995, to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Choctaw donation, the president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, visited Oklahoma to thank native people. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar also paid them a visit. In 2017 a sculpture titled “Kindred Spirits” was installed in Midleton, Ireland. It beautifully depicts an empty bowl, framed by a graceful circle of feathers.

The Choctaw-Ireland Scholarships are another unique partnership. The Republic of Ireland provides tuition and expenses for a Choctaw recipient to study at University College, Cork. More scholarships were later made possible by a matching donation through the Chahta Foundation to allow more native students to study in Ireland. So it continues: The stunning power of kindness… and memory. Resurrexit!

Anyone who lives long enough questions. Why do the wicked prosper? Why do the young die? Why does potential wither while evil thrives? Why do high hopes sometimes smash against rocky reality? The genius of today’s gospel is that Jesus doesn’t try to answer the questions. He enters into them.

Mark’s passion begins with the exquisite scene of Jesus’ anointing. The rigid, bottom-line bean-counters hate the scandal: how will they justify the expense or fit it on their spreadsheets? But Jesus praises her–“she has done what she could”–thus, hold onto kindness and beauty, which help us through the worst.

As does a meal with friends. Jesus’ concern in his final hours isn’t with imminent, brutal suffering but with a last, poignant gesture of friendship. He reaches out to them–and to us–with the nurture of bread, the spirit of wine and the praise of song. During his whole ordeal, there is no word of recrimination, though it would be understandable. He responds to crushing betrayal by pouring out love.

To the logical, it makes no sense. But to the believer, the powerless triumph. Those who seem defeated ultimately win. The questions aren’t answered, but One goes before us who lives through them, endures.

St. Patrick’s Day seems the perfect excuse to pause the Lenten reflections and praise Celtic spirituality. I’ve already explained my attraction to it in A Generous Lap: A Spirituality of Grandparenting. This orthodox stream of Christianity developed parallel to the Roman, more attuned to preserving imperial might and power. Easy to see the appeal of an approach that is more poetic than doctrinal.

Its emphasis on God shining through creation seems well suited to children, who have finely attuned sensual antennas to the world they are discovering. It’s not unusual to see them scooping up an intriguing bug or worm for closer inspection, sinking their faces deep into a fragrant flower. When they hear music, they dance without inhibition, their bodies instinctively responding fully, while adults might primly tolerate a slight toe tapping.

John Philip Newell is an expert on Celtic spirituality, and it was a privilege to make two weekend retreats with him. I still remember my delight-in-discovery, and how it spilled into subsequent weeks after I’d been more attuned to God’s footprints and fingerprints in the natural world.

In his book Listening for the Heartbeat of God, Newell differentiates with two apostles’ names two ways of thinking which are complementary: John’s discovers God in all creation, light wherever it is to be found. Peter’s enshrines the light in the Church: the rock of shelter in tradition and sacraments. For the former, all creation is God’s temple: “For a true contemplative, a green tree works just as well as a golden tabernacle.” (p. 171) For the latter, God stands in relation to a particular people, within four walls. The two come together: “Being part of the song of creation and, as members of the Church, of the living communion of saints, are two aspects of the one mystery.” (p. 98)

A healthy spirituality needs both emphases, but at different times in our lives, we might favor one perspective over the other. Once, I would’ve been uplifted by good liturgy with rousing music and a fine homily. Now, I find that spark of joy in the veil of clouds parting to reveal a glistening mountain range, or the play of light on water. “Our religious sanctuaries are at best side chapels onto the great cathedral of creation.”

In Newell’s book Christ of the Celts, I found an essential difference with the doctrine many of us learned early: first and deepest, we are of God, not opposed to God. Grace is given not to make us something other than ourselves, but to make us radically ourselves. (p. 10) His description of his grandmother hit home: she knew he was mischievous, but looked deeper. “I knew that to her I was precious and would always be precious… my epiphany moment came when I realized that Granny was more loving than the God of my religious tradition.” (p.88)

I can no longer define myself, my children, grandchildren or any human by the “blight” of evil, “instead of seeing what is deeper still, the beauty of the image of God at the core of our being.” (p. 12) Any religious service which focuses on sin fails to nurture, and indeed, contradicts our oneness with God, our primary identity as beloved children.

So cheers to the lyric joy of Celtic spirituality, and the long, lovely tradition of St. Brigid and St. Pat!

Nicodemus gets a bad rap. He’s criticized for coming to Jesus “by night.” But consider the references to him after today’s gospel. Courageously, he defends Jesus against his angry peers, asking whether their law judges a man who has not had a fair hearing (John 7:50-51). After the crucifixion, he helps embalm and bury Jesus’ body (19:39).

He is an honest seeker, who won’t settle for tried-and-true cliches. His colleagues quickly dismiss anyone with a different angle. Nicodemus, however, explores the new teaching carefully, which takes some time. He questions honestly, and Jesus doesn’t reject him. Instead, Jesus welcomes their discussion and reveals himself magnificently, as light penetrating darkness.

Jesus even seems to tease Nicodemus as a teacher who doesn’t “get it” (v. 10). Nicodemus must be overwhelmed: he doesn’t respond.

Or maybe he answers through his life. After an avalanche of ideas, he sifts through them and applies them to daily events. Apparently Jesus’ teaching withstands that reality check; Nicodemus becomes an admirable follower, “his works done in God.”

Do we act like him, or do we stagnate in unexamined prejudices and stale beliefs? Are we open to the insecurity of Spirit’s unsettling winds?  

Those who like their Jesus sweet and pious better skip today’s gospel. Those who want to explore his complex depths should read on.

The scene of driving the sellers and money-changers from the temple can’t be camouflaged by platitudes: it is violent and chaotic. What prompted Jesus to act so dramatically? We have a clue in the way “my Father’s house” is used throughout John’s gospel. “In my Father’s house are many rooms” we read in 14:2. That sounds spacious, but there is no room for greed, betrayal or sacrilege. The merchants have made the “Father’s house a marketplace,” desecrated what is most precious to God; thus, they must be expelled quickly and efficiently. 

In Jesus’ ensuing discussion with the Jews, their pride is attacked. Any of us who spent forty-six years on a project might react the same way.

As is often the case, they remain on a literal level, seeing the temple as a building. Jesus, however, sees it as an image of the self: beloved of God and incorruptible, transcending the most glorious edifice. As he protected sacred ground, so he fights to preserve God’s children from any who oppress, exploit, degrade or harm them. Do we respect each other or ourselves as much as he does?

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 its cause. See Nicholas Kristof’s Feb. 3 article in the New York Times: “What Can We Possibly Say to the Children of Gaza?”

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 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. As John Philip Newell points out in Christ of the Celts, the doctrine of original sin, invented in the fourth century has tragically taught that “what is deepest in us is opposed to God rather than of God.” It disempowers because it says “we are essentially ugly rather than rooted in divine beauty, essentially selfish rather than made in the image of love.” It has done untold damage, especially indoctrinating children, denying their inherent dignity.

Not to deny the existence of woundedness, greed and self-interest. Jesus clearly understood the context of anything less than the fullness of what God wants us to become, our birthright. 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. As Julian of Norwich said, “between God and the soul, there is no between.”

Jesus said, “the Prince of this world has no hold on me,” so we belong to God, not to what threatens. If we over-identify with our emotions, achievements, fears, 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 source of vitality 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 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 during ordinary days? Through health care workers, nature’s shining beauty, kind friends, relatives who don’t tire of our cranky moods or repeated stories? Grace restores our natural, finest self.

With six weeks of Lent ahead, some may still be looking for a direction or focus. Joyce Rupp’s Jesus, Guide of my Life, (www.avemariapress.com, 800-282-1865) points out a “path that is a person.”

Disclaimer: Joyce has been a friend and mentor for over 25 years, and I still believe her Foreword to my first book, Hidden Women of the Gospels, accounts for most of its success. In her usual way, she compacts profound substance into short bits. After praying these Lenten meditations daily for over five weeks, I can attest that in a brief time, they provide prayer prompts and thoughtful material for the day.

One thing that has made Joyce’s work enormously popular is how quickly readers can identify with her. By the second day, I was saying, “she’s so like me—quick to judge, wanting to see immediate results of good deeds, easily blinded by ‘decoys’ on the Way.” She doesn’t write from lofty seclusion in a convent, but clearly gets what it’s like to live with the tensions and contradictions of a complex life, filled with work, relationships, stresses, joys and the quirky ways childhood hurts and roles resurface. Sometimes when we’re tired and life looks blurry, it’s a relief to have such a crystalline reminder of Jesus’ “wise insights and compassionate mentoring.”

They may seem small details of style, but as one sensitive to the way authors present content, I was grateful for Joyce’s innovative use of language: for example, anxieties “slurp up your precious daytime energy” (73) and forgiveness “lifts the lid off coffined love.” (83) Like the “99 Beautiful Names for God” in Islam, her prayers are addressed to names for God we might not have used before: Disrupter of Complacency, Source of Easing Burdens, Storehouse of Promises, Awakened One, Companion in the Dark, Beloved Foot-Washer. It’s worth the $13.95 price of the book for its unique spin on Jesus’ wild  inclusivity. In his day, that meant hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors. The tired translation is often, “be nice to an unhoused person on the street.” But Joyce convincingly describes “conversation with a pony-tailed, leather-garbed, heavily bearded motorcyclist.” (86) Who woulda thought of that?

The trifecta: the book is a guide, Joyce is a guide and Jesus is a guide. We who benefit three ways can learn much from this author who has walked in sync with Jesus for many years, clearly has a deep, close relationship with him, and generously shares creative guidelines for the journey.

Given the economy of Mark’s gospel, a few verses can draw forth subtle meanings and many questions. Such is the case for this week’s gospel, when Jesus cures Peter’s mother-in-law. For centuries, Catholic hierarchs have insisted on a celibate clergy, neatly glossing over the fact that if first pope Peter had a mother-in-law, Peter had a wife.

And what of her story? Did she too long to follow the teacher? Did she resent his luring away her husband, only source of the family’s income? Did anyone consult her about the crowd gathered at her door, seeking healing? In the vast St. Peter’s basilica, is there a single statue to her?

And what about her mom? Some have called the line “then the fever left her and she waited on them” as the ultimate male fantasy. Of course a seriously ill woman, recently healed would leap to her feet and cook dinner for the disciples?! Unanswered questions, rumblings and undertones here.

No question about Jesus. Clear and decisive, he grasps the sick woman’s hand and soothes the fever as mothers have for centuries.

So where’s the center of gravity? I like to focus on the hand of Jesus, outstretched to heal, reaching beyond all the difficulties in the passage, and probably the tensions in the house of the fisherman. It prompts us to think of all the hands, literal and figurative, that have held us through crisis, loneliness, illness. No matter what our fevers—anxieties, money or health problems, relationship issues, concerns about climate change or war—God initiates the healing,  extends the soothing hand.

Bored by January? Chafing at the narrow confines of bad weather? Depressed by the news?  Crazy with cabin fever? Have I got an answer for you! The free film “Gratitude Revealed,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gN0pMCHte4

Many are already familiar with the work on gratitude pioneered by David Steindl-Rast, OSB. As a young Austrian during World War II, he was hidden from the Nazis by his mother, and his family wondered if they’d starve to death. He differentiates happiness from joy, which “doesn’t depend on what happens.” Those who aren’t familiar might try his website: grateful.org or book: Gratitude: the Heart of Prayer. Based on that solid foundation, the film soars into stunning photography around the world, fascinating interviews, and a breathtaking display of what Catholics once called “the Communion of Saints,” ordinary, sacred people in international settings, all sparks of the divine.

Just a sampling of these folks absorbed in doing what they love: chefs, a vineyard owner, a barber, salsa dancers and cliff dancers, surfers, farmers, a blind ice climber, the first woman champion of aeronautic acrobatics (that’s a plane doing wild, spinny gymnastics), a rancher on the Continental Divide, a weaver, a lady in Maine who fishes for lobsters and teaches children, a jazz musician in Waterproof, LA, film producers, a gospel choir, the co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, a hat-maker, firefighter, Olympic boxer, an Improv. Comedy class for women recently released from prison. Add in the diversity of children in many nations for sweetness and grace. One eloquent little girl explains how t.v. can’t top the “beautifuller things” she finds, exploring her island home.

Preacher Mosie Burks sparkles with vitality; Norman Lear, screenwriter and producer of over 100 sitcoms glows with quiet humor; author Jack Kornfield offers mystical insights; Pastor Michael Beckwith reminds us to be grateful for challenge, a “gift in work clothes.”  And what a wicked delight to see skimpy salsa costumes in the same film as the robes of a Benedictine monk!

Louie Schwartzberg, who made the film, explains that his parents were holocaust survivors, grateful for many things, especially for having children. He is adept at time-lapse photography of nature, so we see insects in intricate close-up, monarch butterflies taking flight, and flowers opening as gradually as the habit of gratitude develops. With so much beauty, the viewer can forgive a few cliches.

Tired of focusing on dysfunction and disorder?  (Sheesh—Pope Francis can’t even say hell is empty, as St. Catherine of Siena did in the fourteenth century, without provoking outrage.) Try “Gratitude Revealed.”  It’s will cost only 1 hour, 22 minutes of your time. It leads logically and with abundant examples to the theme that cultivating gratitude leads to increased trust in life. And couldn’t we all learn a little more trust? Or in spunkier terms:

“How I long to be in that number

When the saints go marching in…”