Pope Francis

Makes it Cool to Love Jesus Again

   We have a Pope who after only a year in office is making people ask such heretofore unheard of questions that its cool to love Jesus again. Not that we didn't always love him, but lots of us didn't wholly understand him. Now, even John Stewart loves him through this Pope. He is making catholic more christian again and people want it.  He's not a remote dogmatist with a knuckle slapping ruler on a narrow set of doctrines. He's a hugger. Kids want to jump in his car with him.

   This Pope's emphasis is where Jesus' emphasis was-on the Poor, the Marginalized, the Despised, the outcast, the lost, the lonely, the strangers. He is a Matthew 25 pope. This is the acceptable year of the Lord where Isaiah's teaching found in the mouth of Jesus is mirrored in the works of Francis.

  He has championed immigrants of the destitute variety, he has visited prisoners, given out gospels to thousands like a tract peddling missionary, washed women's feet, and embraced modern day leper equivalents like his namesake, cleaned house at the Vatican Bank, sent Blingey Bishops packing and selling their maniors, and has clergy wondering if they really should be fleecing the sheep. The Vicar of Christ looks more like the walking talking  heart of Christ than anything anyone recalls seeing in a long time in that form.

   One Cardinal said- he has freed the church from its bourgeois roots. [Because that was boring and missed the point]
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/the-vatican/detail/articolo/kasper-kasper-kasper-33324/

 Jesus didn't come to protect your assets, get  you in a five bedroom in the suburbs with a butler and a lawn maintenance contract, or develop your portfolio-or build you a second home at the beach, a manior in provence, or set your retirement- he came to heal the sick, preach good news to the poor, free the oppressed and deliver from sin to eternal life everyone who believes in him, rich or poor.  You don't rank more if you have an honorific title, a snotty demeanor, or if you wear designer duds to church banquets any more than the guy sitting next to him on the bus on his commute off the evening shift. There are no luggage racks on hearses.

  Jesus is more than your financial planner- He is your best friend, your savior, your mentor, your father, your hope. Your inheritance is in Christ-forever in a beautiful place- eternal life to a place where there is no weeping or disease, no envy, capitalist competition, or striving. Pure Joy for those who love the Lord and walk according to his purposes. The guy with sores on his feet, sitting with no shoes on outside the city gate waiting for the rich passers by to toss crumbs at him may get to heaven before you do unless you notice that guy and try to help. We are reminded of the impassible chasm between rich and poor by the Feather Ruffler in Chief who wants us to notice Lazarus at the gate.

    Love your enemies- even when they trash talk, persecute and demean and demoralize you while scamming  you. Love them all- because you can't die now. Don't fear anyone who can do anything to your body- your soul is
in Christ secured if you get with the real program, not the fake one embroidered in dogmatic finery.   So now start valuing everyone you looked down on before- everyone who insulted you, everyone whom you thought deserved your haughty rebuke, everyone who smells like sheep. Love the least of these, my brethren.
Most of all those who didn't deserve your love- because you don't deserve God's either but he loves you anyway.  He loves the dirt poor as much as the petit bourgeois et grand bourgeois- all of whom he created and formed in his own likeness.

   This is a Pope who makes people happy to be catholic and want to talk about Jesus. He's less a Pope of wealthy suburbs and more barios and ghettos. He goes where the suffering is- not the places of pampered egoism. I love this Pope.


Tomorrow, Tuesday night, you can hear pre-eminent Pope watcher and religious news commentator Jesuit Father Tom Reese who will speak at Holy Trinity, Georgetown at 7:00 pm on Pope Francis- a year after the white smoke put him in his simple white cassock and crumpled brown shoes.

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Post by Catholic News Service.

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Pray for Us

In my neighborhood

In my back yard
The Sun Shines through the Cold
and snow drapes the rocks
and the Ducks
 forgot to fly south for winter
 but there's still time, don't dither
 to save their souls
 from the cold I'm told.

 

Let it Always Be

Christmas in your heart and home.

     The Douglas Furs on the sidewalks,  snow covers the cars
      the chill is in the air and the politics drags on
      back to bitter diatribe, the who is right or lied on
      the corruption in the Governors' hide, the devil
      wears Louis Vuitton it seems, snide pundits and comedians
     mock apple pie and you, and things you once held true
     like babies are babies even inside you
     The polar freeze bends in the breeze
     my Charlie Brown Christmas Tree
     on the balcony called fire escape
     where I also draped my tinsel till late
     January just to piss off the building Super. This is the day
     that Jack Frost made, let us rejoice
     and be glad. Though Christmas trees dangle
    from sidewalks and sadness pervades the darkened
    skyscape, insist on the memory you made
    that tells you Christmas is every day
    if you hold in your pocket the baby incarnate
   who dared ask you who he is. Whether he comes on a stork
    or a cloud, he's coming, and ready or not
    It's always Christmas in New York.

Good Day, Bad Day, Either Way

The Sun is Still There

Happy New Year, still.

God is….

God is like an Ocean

   Our souls like sprinklers attached with a hose. We have to decide to turn it on- and it irrigates our lives with fruit abundantly--blessings, inspirations and overflowing love. You can also not try to clean it and it gets clogged and you can't get a pure flow. (Create in me a clean heart and cast not your holy spirit from me)  It can get stuck, so you have to make sure it is clean and the line clear. You can refuse to believe its there so never turn it on, but the Ocean has always been there.

    I am the Vine, you are the Branches. Without me you can do nothing.

There has always been the Ocean and it always tended to flow into anything desiring sourcing from it or connected to it because its nature is overwhelmingly generous (if your own child asked for a loaf of bread are you going to give them a snake?). But if it is dammed up or clogged up it cannot reach the soul.

No one owns the Ocean.


     The reason why 'social conservatives' have lost so colossally politically is because they think they have a superior claim to own the Ocean and this is pure hubris.  It ridiculously arrogantly trivializes God and his people to suggest that they all must be Republicans, or all must vote a certain platform or all must back certain political agendas. It demeans, diminishes God and makes him in our image of political ethics. You cannot imagine an Ocean by worshipping a glass of water in a holy font. You cannot reduce God to a political platform.

     God's love is for everybody and the soul is in everybody as images of Him by virtue of their humanity created by and for him in his image.. He promises that whosoever calls on his son's name will be saved. He loves the least, the littlest, the most marginal , the most despised, the most outcasted, the most forgotten as much as he loves the richest, most powerful, most influential. Perhaps more-because he identified as the 'least of these my brethren.'  His point is that the most despised in human terms is the dearest, sweetest creature to Him.

 So there is no room for political ego or pride, or feelings of ethical or moral superiority. It is an offense to God. It is a sadness.  God is like an Ocean. You cannot stop the torrents of his Love when he wants to flow it into someone who turned on the spicket. God blesses whom he wills.

   

Happy MLK Day- Martin Luther King, Jr. On Life

epiphanies

"Shall I Be Mother?"

   This is a colloquial British phrase said when one is reaching for the teapot to serve tea which is usually responded to by things like 'black please' or 'one sugar' or 'just a spot of milk, please.'  I just heard it again while watching the Iron Lady movie where Meryl Streep plays brilliantly Margaret Thatcher. (Netflix-highly recommend it)

   This reminded me of the questions Elizabeth and Mary both must have had. Shall I---be Mother? Its a question that got answered- complete with names…yes, so sure am I here is his name.

  The spiritual inquiry is met with a pretty clear answer in both cases. Its definitive, its strong, its -here is what is going to happen. Are you with us here? the Angel seemed to wait for a response after the initial skepticism- How can that happen? I haven't been with a guy- promise. Then the Angel says, God will get the job done (nothing is impossible with God, remember). He proposes and waits for a respose . This is the reverse-totally unlike the fallen angels or demons who found the daughters of men so beautiful they raped them-the Nephalim. God proposes and gets consent after waiting for the answer. The demons rape. God proposes nicely.

     The same gentlemanly angel goes to Elizabeth who is ancient and beyond menopause one assumes. Like Sarah you can hear the laughter under her breath. (Isaac's name means 'Laughter' it seemed so ridiculous- it was laughable even)- But what did God do when Zechariah doubted it? He just shut him up until he went with the program- listen, you don't open your mouth until you affirm his name is John.

     So here we have God doing what only God can do- because it was beyond human capacity or conniving to concoct and who really would want to? Mary might have liked to get pregnant a little later- Elizabeth a little earlier- but God has  plans that don't fit our schedules sometimes. God operates out of time and inside time-because he is eternal.


  And so next Sunday we have what we associate with babies- Baptism- the Baptism of the Lord. It happens that the Lord was adult baptized at the start of his ministry- age around 30 we think. But it birthed a new kind of ministry-or a new dimension to his ministry. It birthed a new start into the years where his teaching was the richest, and the mission the clearest. God took about 30 years to unfold that plan so it was manifest to the world while it was simmering inside him for much of his life--at least from the time he was 12 in his 'father's house' reading Talmud -Torah in the Temple.

  God's promises are true and unfailing. Nothing is impossible with God. Because he is God.