Upper Room Liturgy - Fifth Sunday in Lent

Kim Panaro, ARCWP and Lynn Kinlan, ARCWP led the Upper Room Liturgy with the theme: Holy Humility. 

Theme:

Our theme today is Holy Humility. We look toward the examples of Therese of Liseaux, Jesus and Anastastios to teach us the value of emptying ourselves with love. The Japanese have a tradition called Kintsugi. They repair broken vessels with precious gold. In doing so, the repaired (or healed) object is stronger and more beautiful than before. We are such Earthen Vessels for God.

Opening Prayer for Peace by Lynn Kinlan

We come and greet one another in the holy Presence of the Divine, to celebrate community and to be nourished by the peace of  Christ.  In our sharing of peace, may we be refreshed with the sense that:

Our greeting of soul- peace is not sentimental.  Peace is a tide coming in on the shore, rolling and gentle and insistent. 

Let’s flood the person on our left with peace and allow it to gently roll around the circle leftward.

Peace is not self-satisfied and tribal,; it is all encompassing like the air we breathe and reliable like the earth upon which we stand.

Let’s surround the person on our right with peace and send it rightward as the wind of the Holy Spirit moves. 

May our circle of peace be a reliable companion as our circle moves outward for today into a wounded world greatly in need of comfort and reassurance. Amen.

First Reading:

From the first moment of his presence in humanity, Christ makes self-emptying the revelation of the love of the Divine. He spends the greater part of his human life in the simplicity of everyday labor…

The power of love is totally bound up with humility. The opposite of love we usually call hatred. But its real name is egoism…Christ ransoms us, chained in our egoism, by accepting the ultimate humiliation, the cross. By this humility he abolishes all pride and self-centeredness. In that hour, the glory of his love shines forth and we are redeemed.

Christian life means continual assimilation of the mystery of the cross in the fight against individual and social selfishness. This holy humility, which is ready to accept the ultimate sacrifice, is the mystical power behind Christian mission…

One of the greatest dangers for Christian mission is that we become forgetful in the practice of the cross and create a comfortable type of Christian who sees the cross as ornament and may prefer to crucify others rather than to be crucified oneself…

These are the inspired words of Archbishop Anastasios of Albania and the community affirms them by saying: Amen.

Gospel Reading:

Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover feast came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and declared, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew and then they went and told Jesus.

Jesus answered them saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.

Jesus continued, whoever loves his life, loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Holy One will honor whoever serves me.”

These are the inspired words of the gospel writer John and the community affirms them by saying: Amen.

Homily Starter:                                                       Kim Panaro, ARCWP

Why should we consider the path of humility in these last few weeks of Lent? So many people in our world struggle with low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.  As 21st century theology moves us away from Atonement Theology in favor of a Theology of Blessing it would seem very nearly to be going backwards to embrace concepts like humility. Humility has often been synonymous with promoting a sense of guilt, unworthiness and of being “less than”. What do today’s gospel reading, the life of St. Therese of Liseaux and our first reading from Archbishop Anastasios offer as a way to understand humility as the heart of the Christian mission?

St. Therese, the great doctor of the Church, embodies this wisdom like no other. She was called to the priesthood and to be a missionary but her life path was quite different. Her mother had died when she was very young and she had watched all her mother figure sisters leave to go into the convent. She lived a life of complete charity and humility as a perpetual novice in her cloistered Carmel community until she died in agony of tuberculosis at age 24.   She learned to embrace humility as the path of unconditional love for God and her sisters. She never denied her own suffering, her challenges, her pain, her doubts or her fears.  Rather, she saw them as an opportunity to be more loving to those around her. She was so kind and loving in fact that several of her sister nuns were very mean to her. Instead of ego driven anger and hurt, Therese put aside her own ego and need for human affirmation and embraced the opportunity to love those sisters with an even greater compassion. She chose to love others with the bigger, all embracing love that she experienced in her relationship with her God.  She did not deny her brokenness but she embraced the strength and the beauty that could come from it. Like the beauty of the vase that is repaired by gold, the soul that lives in union with the unconditional love of God can reflect that love in care for others. She emptied herself of ego and the need to be understood by others because she lived in humble union with the source of all who is Love itself………..God.
       

Author CS Lewis said that “Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself, it means thinking of yourself less”.  In other words, it isn’t about putting ourselves down, it’s about moving beyond the “me” in favor of the “we.” It is the paradox of letting go in order to gain all, forgetting oneself to find oneself, embracing death to gain life. In our first reading today, Archbishop Anastasios challenges us to understand that the cross is about letting go of selfishness and egoism just as Jesus did. Jesus’ witness of unconditional radical love for all regardless of gender, social status, adherence to religious legalism or past behaviors made him such a threat to religious and political leaders that they killed him in the way most degrading and painful way they knew, crucifixion. Jesus’ cross represents the triumph of self-emptying love for neighbor.  In our gospel reading today, Jesus points to the lesson that in dying, the grain of wheat produces life.  The cross becomes our symbol that unconditional love leads to life and that death does not have the final word.  The intended humiliation of Jesus at the crucifixion was not effective because his focus was on love of others and God.

How about you and I? Do we embrace this holy humility? Do we place our hopes on the path of complete self-emptying  and sacrifice of our egos in order to live as Jesus? It is not simply about doing good works, or being a social worker or social activist. Those are part of the work but they are not the goal itself. The goal is love. The mystical heart of the cross is the paradox of letting go of all to gain all.  If we have the vision of Therese, Jesus and Anastasios, we might be able to use our own emotional, physical, psychological hurts and pains to open our arms wider to embrace and love those around us.  We don’t need to think less of ourselves but by thinking of ourselves less, we take the power away from the injustices and hurts in our lives in favor of the joy of living for others and for God.  That is holy humility. That is living in the Kindom of God.

What do you think?

Closing Prayer: inspired by a poem by John Soos

May we be rooted but restless seeds, struggling toward light, growing and bursting and from our efforts, loving our wounded world toward peace and justice. And may we look with fortitude and hope at losing life to save it, letting go in the mystery of the seed’s death to welcome the miracle of new birth.   Amen

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"Soul Women of the United Nations’ Five Regions of the World" by Mary Sue Barnett ARCWP

Nothing less

than a cosmological

miracle

will summon

the women.

Celestial suns

spinning

are too many

to count.

Shooting stars

exploding

are too numerous

to track.

Glorious light

expanding

is too awe-inspiring

to behold.

Nothing less

than a cosmological

miracle

will discompose

the world.

Like titanic

rivers flowing

the women

of the five

regions speak.

“Femicide no more!”

say the women of Latin America and the Caribbean

“Men must befriend us!”

say the women of Western Europe and Other Groups

“End the misogyny!”

say the women of Eastern Europe

“You will not take our girls!”

say the women of Africa

“Male power will cease and desist!”

say the women of Asia Pacific

The rushing rivers

of prolonged cry

converge into a brand

new moment.

At the transcendent

still point

gold pours forth

into the universal

female heart.

On that day

in the cafe

she sips flecks

of gold from

her latte.

"The Transformative Promise of Pope Francis, Five Years On", By James Carroll March 13, 2018, The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-transformative-promise-of-pope-francis-five-years-on

Pope Francis has addressed the crisis of Western culture by modelling mercy toward migrants, misfits, the young, and the planet itself.

Photograph by Andrea Bonetti / Greek Prime Minister's Office / Getty

"It has been five years since Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the papacy, and the press is full of positive assessments. The Pope’s observers note that he represents good P.R. for the Catholic Church (selfies with young people); that he has taken on the bureaucracy of the Curia and cleaned up the Vatican Bank; that he undercuts doctrinal rigidity with pastoral accommodation (Communion for divorced people, acceptance of gay people); that he has shifted the Church’s focus to the global South; that he advocates powerfully for migrants and the environment; and that he promotes the exercise of rational faith while affirming traditional devotion. This is an important litany, surely, but it obscures a larger point. A proper evaluation of the Argentine’s pontificate must begin not with the Pope himself but with the response that he has drawn from a vast population, including the legions who couldn’t care less about his creed. Catholicism is his platform, his home, his intellectual framework, and his native language, yet the secular world has found solace in him. He is a threshold figure who points to the urgency of faith, less in God than in the human future.

Here is another litany of our time: democracy besieged; the return of nuclear dread; claustrophobic tribalism; masculinity off the rails; self-destroying structures of power; élites in flight from the social contract; uncheckable militarism; politically charged nostalgia for a past that never existed. Such intractable conditions elicit a desperate hunger for more than merely material solutions. But religion, much less some Pope-led Catholic Reconquista, cannot be the answer. Roman Catholicism has been morally gutted by rapist priests and their protectors, but faiths of many stripes have been undercut by extremists—white-supremacist evangelicals, misogynist Islamists, the militarized Judaism of Israeli settlements, even a genocidal Buddhism in Myanmar. Where, with so many institutions of communal trust in ruins, can spiritual longing find its footing?

By some unexpected combination of character and conviction, Francis arrived on the scene with a relevance that the world grasped at once, perhaps recognizing this post-religious need in itself. Unlike his predecessors, the Argentine does not comes off as a throwback oddity, to be valued, if at all, like a gilded museum piece. Instead, for the past five years, he has taken full advantage of his position as the figurehead of what began as an incubator of Western culture, addressing that culture’s crisis by lifting up what made it precious in the first place. This is the point of mercy, which Francis proclaims, in word and in deed, as the measure that matters—mercy toward migrants, misfits, the young, and the very planet. His brand of mercy is not a warm bath of tender feelings but a hard-edged refusal to think the worst not only of those in trouble, or of his critics, but of himself. “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” he was asked early in his pontificate. He replied, “I am a sinner. That is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.” The Pope’s detractors—from the right, where he is derided as a moral relativist, and the left, where he is seen as an instinctive defender of patriarchy—were thus put on notice right at the start.

The language of sin comes naturally to Francis, but he might equally have cited Montaigne’s dictum “I feel oppressed by an error of mind. . . . I try to correct it, but I cannot root it out.” What the world has witnessed since 2013 is nothing less than Francis’s great struggle with the Church’s monumental error of mind. That error boils down to a preference for the traditionalist worldview, which sees existence as complete, ordered, and in harmony with unchanging divine purpose, over what might be called the historical worldview, which assumes change, contingency, and randomness—all the lessons of evolution. Clericalism, enshrined in the defensive, all-male mores of the priesthood (notwithstanding the many selfless priests), defines this error, and Francis, despite having railed against clericalism, showed himself to be stuck in it when, earlier this year, he defended Juan Barros Madrid, a Chilean bishop who has been accused of covering up sex abuse. After hearing the outraged objections of survivors, Francis promptly backed off his position and ordered a new investigation, demonstrating that he knew he’d been wrong. He didn’t say, at the time, “I am a sinner.” But he might have.

The most potent instance of the traditionalist error is the unrelenting relegation of Catholic women to a position of inferiority, embodied in the prohibition of female ordination. The Vatican justifies the ban with absurdly literalist readings of Scripture (there were no women among the twelve apostles), which are wholly out of synch with the Church’s otherwise ample commitment to accommodating the theological contradictions and inconsistencies found in the four Gospels. In the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, this sanctified discrimination can finally be seen for what it is—less an error of mind, perhaps, than a willful error of soul. Though Francis sided, early on, with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an association of American nuns, in its fight against Vatican interference, he has shown no readiness to root out the deeper prejudice.

But if this blatant papal blind spot does not disqualify Francis as an avatar of post-religious possibility it is because he has clearly set in motion positive currents of change that run deeper than anything he might himself intend. He has made spiritual imagination—faith that goes beyond the material and the established; goodness that can be striven for and accomplished—seem consistent with secular preoccupation. It is toward that larger significance that his narrow institutional role points. Change is coming to the Catholic Church, and if it can happen there it can happen anywhere.

That became clear when, early on, the Pope insisted—again, in both word and deed—that experience takes priority over doctrine, mercy over rules, which is a pious way of affirming nothing less than the scientific method, the testability of truth. The Pope may not actually be changing doctrine as such, but emphasizing experience over doctrine changes the way that doctrine is regarded. To cite the most discussed example, divorced people should feel free to receive Communion, whatever complications result for “the tradition.” This principle may ultimately transform the way that many Catholic teachings are applied. The Church’s firm opposition to birth control, for instance, could be softened by an acceptance of condom use to protect health, or by a practical preference for contraception over abortion. Similarly, the Vatican’s absolutist stance on euthanasia could be mitigated by a refusal to promote “extraordinary” efforts to prolong life in the face of pointless suffering. As revolutions in biology and genetics change techniques of human reproduction, so the meaning of reproduction changes, too—and, after Francis, the Church can find ways to adjust to that. The conservatives, in other words, are right to warn that this Pope is altering the anatomy of Catholic life and thought.

The post-Enlightenment adjustments in the faith did not begin with Francis. Take Christian supersessionism, the conviction that the adherents of the Church replaced the Israelites as God’s chosen people, leaving Jews with no religious future. 

Supersessionism was for centuries a Scripture-based pillar of the Christian imagination. Yet, after the Holocaust, when Jews were left with no physical future, the Second Vatican Council, under John XXIII, formally abandoned this igniting theology, a far larger change than anything to do with divorce or women’s ordination—experience over doctrine par excellence. Rather than resist the underlying meaning of such change, as his two predecessors did, Francis has advanced it with supreme naturalness, even while showing in his own uneven reactions how hard it is to uproot “an error of mind.” Here is where his importance beyond the Church shows itself. When received structures of life and thought are crumbling, such a demonstration of the possibility of change is precious. In renouncing his designated position of moral superiority, this man has found his moral authority. A self-avowed human being, decidedly fallible, sits easily in the Chair of St. Peter.

Self-avowedly human, yes, but also self-accepting. Francis conveys a sense that his life as it is (not as he wants it to be or as it should be) is enough. That this conviction springs from a hard-earned trust in the essential goodness of existence—or, as he puts it, in the mercy of God—may explain his magnetism. The life of Pope Francis has itself become a kind of secular encyclical. In this white-robed octogenarian can be glimpsed the transcendent possibility toward which all desire stretches, whether that of the abject poor, who recognize him as an ally, or that of success-obsessed élites, who are ironically burdened by the ultimate vacuousness of the luxuries that he eschews.

Without proselytizing, or claiming to be a model, Francis proposes that a depth of life—physical security opening to moral meaningfulness—is proper to every person, which is why every person deserves respect, and why, falling short of that depth, every person deserves mercy. For those outside the Pope’s hemmed-in zone of doctrinal reference, it makes little difference if, to Francis, such depth comes from faith in God. What makes the difference is the promise that transcendence is less about angels in Heaven than about self-surpassing humans on Earth. The religious expression for that self-surpassingness is “hope.” The profane word is “history.”

"American Indian teens head to Vatican, hoping to overturn historic papal decrees They formed the basis of the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, which shapes U.S. Indian policy to this day and haunts Indians' well-being, the group says." By Jean Hopfensperger Star Tribune

http://www.startribune.com/american-indian-teens-head-to-vatican-hoping-to-overturn-historic-papal-decrees/477183033/

..."A quick history lesson: Several papal decrees, known as “bulls,” were issued in the 1400s to legitimize the domination and destruction of non-Christian people. Those decrees, embraced by the early European colonizers of the Americas, formed the basis of U.S. Indian policy, which allowed the government to seize Indian land, remove its people, and control their personal and property rights, said Jacobs.

For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 1823 case that the titles of land discovered and conquered belonged to the conquering nation. American Indians only had the right to occupy it. As recently as 2005, the Supreme Court referred to this Doctrine of Discovery in a ruling against the Oneida Indian nation of New York, advocates note.

Walking Elk said a more recent example of indigenous rights being superseded by federal or corporate rights is the Keystone Pipeline running near Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Centuries of being treated as second-class citizens, or worse, has left a profound mark on Indian peoples, he said. 

Last week, Walking Elk and about a dozen students and some parents gathered in a classroom at Guadalupe Alternative Programs in St. Paul, where he teaches indigenous ceremonies. The smell of burning sage drifted into the classroom from a healing circle down the hall. The group got a trip update before joining the ceremony.

The need to heal underlies the Vatican trip, students said."

"Vatican UN rep sponsors event to combat trafficking of rural women and girls" Nirmala CarvalhoMar 18, 2018

https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2018/03/18/vatican-un-rep-sponsors-event-to-combat-trafficking-of-rural-women-and-girls/

MUMBAI, India - Poor rural women and girls around the world have been victimized by human traffickers, who target their communities due to their poverty and lack of social services.

A seminar to discuss tackling this problem was co-sponsored by the Vatican’s mission to the United Nations in New York on March 13 in New York.

“Rural women and girls are especially vulnerable to being ensnared by traffickers because they regularly lack access to adequate schooling and health, and are often marginalized, stigmatized and isolated due to poverty, unemployment and the lack of rural infrastructure,” said Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the Vatican representative to the United Nations.

“Rural girls and women are especially vulnerable to the lies of traffickers who promise them good work, good food, and education in the big cities. Rural girls are also vulnerable simply to running away to the cities believing that that is a way to improve their lives; such girls, however, often find themselves floundering in the unknown environment and very easy prey to traffickers,” he said.

Auza highlighted in a special way the work being done by “heroic religious sisters” in rural areas all over the world “who, far from the limelight, are going to the existential peripheries to care for the wounds that often don’t come adequately to the attention of the rest of the world.”

RELATED: Work of religious sisters against trafficking “nothing short of miraculous,” expert says

Franciscan Missionaries of Mary Sister Annie Jesus Mary Louis works in rural tribal areas of India, whose people are especially vulnerable to exploitation.

Since 2010, she has been running projects aimed at preventing, rescuing, and accompanying people at risk of trafficking, and has been able to rescue more than 100 women and girls from various cities and help them back into their home communities.

“Sexual exploitation is big business. It is governed by exactly the same principles as any commercial activity: Supply and demand,” she told the meeting.

The nun works in a rural area in the central state of Chattisgarh, and said the people she serves are very poor, with little education, sanitation, or health care.

“Traffickers know all of this. They know that the parents of children in my area are easily deceived, and sometimes so desperate that they willingly sell their own children,” she said during her presentation.

An Irish Blessing: Roma Downey and Phil Coulter, Beautiful!

http://www.andiesisle.com/an.irish.blessing.html

Dave Allen on Religion, Enjoy this funny video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxo81Ok9Urk