Pastor’s Reflection

“Something Beautiful for God.”

When candidates for election to public office bring up the topic of traditional family values, the hair on my neck stands up! The Gospel paints a different picture of the reign of God.   Family values are a big smoke screen in US politics right now for a hunger for old fashioned stability and security.  The religious right is standing up for them and campaigning for them. The Republicans call the Democrats…Godless liberals.  Democrats the Republicans right wing extremists. Nobody is listening much.

Jesus spent a lot of time reflecting on family values as well… In the gospel today he addresses them directly…

“IF ANYONE COMES TO ME AND DOES NOT HATE HIS OWN FATHER AND MOTHER, WIFE AND CHILDREN, AND BROTHERS AND SISTERS, YES EVEN HIS OWN LIFE…HE CANNOT BE MY DISCIPLE…”

Causes one to pause! Doesn’t sound like much of a family man to me.  Kind-a harsh!  Yet I believe Jesus is advocating a family much more intimate and more radical than anything imagined by the political strategists.   Mother Theresa saw it.

We canonize her a saint this weekend. It took her from one religious community to another. It took her from the classroom to the streets. It took her to radical self-giving to the poorest of the poor, to those dying in the streets of Calcutta, India. Most did not share her religion. But she saw the face of Christ in them. Her life advocated radical Christian family values. It shames our American politics. She experienced the most destitute as her brother or sister. The poor were related to her as siblings, like our own St. Francis of Assisi. He called them “the beloved brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus.” Now Saint Theresa can lead us to follow the cross into self-giving for those most on the fringes of our society and culture. Her favorites were the un-loved, the unwanted. But I would be so content if her canonized life could lead us to expand our circle of family. Maybe we find our self more affectively (with our feelings) related to the blended family of human kind. Maybe we could taste anew how it is be related in the breath of life given by the Creator, as creatures en-souled with the image of God.

There is so much to do to make that world real. I love her simple prayer for herself near the end of her life. “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” The title of her 2009 biography by Malcolm Muggeridge is attainable after all, by anybody, “Something beautiful for God.”

A gentle week.
Fr. Michael Weldon, OFM