Tag: john

the acts of the apostles continue

~ julie vieira ~ 2 Comments

Wednesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 343

Acts 5:17-26 
Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9
John 3:16-21

On Monday of this week, Rev. William Barber along with two others were arrested while praying on the steps of the Capitol. Reverend. Barber – a public theologian and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign among many other things – he along with those gathered prayed, “We are here crying to you, Oh, God, because we have heard the cries of your people.” (source)

“We have heard the cries of your people” and for that prayer, for that proclamation of the most basic tenets of the Gospel, they were arrested and threatened with jail. 

I can’t help but think of the Apostles in today’s readings:

“The high priest … filled with jealousy, laid hands upon the Apostles and put them in the public jail.”  (Acts 5:17-18)

The Acts of the Apostles are not stories from a bygone era; they are Acts happening day by day as the People of God stand strong and true, prayerful and passionate, calling for – working for – peace and justice on behalf of the kindom of God.

What a reprieve the Apostles had in that man-made, hate-made structure meant to imprison not just their bodies but their prayers, their words and their actions! The angel of the Lord appears and sets them free. Free not to return quietly to their homes or to exile under the cover of night, but to go back in the light of day to pray, to speak words, and to stand for and with the people of God. They stood in the light of day, ready once again to proclaim, “We have heard the cries of your people”, and to risk imprisonment once again.

But what is the risk of imprisonment, when the risk of the life of the people – especially those who are among the most vulnerable and poor – is constantly under threat? And not just threat, but grave harm and even death?

The Acts of the Apostles in the early Church and the Acts of the Apostles today are not man-made, hate-made. They are the Acts of “Apostolos”, which is Greek for “ones who are sent out”. They are ones who are call for ecclesial and societal transformation in order to build the kindom of God, not the kingdom of men. They call for reform and they also call for a new way of doing things that is meant for all creation, including those who seek to imprison them. 

They are people who have heard the words “God so loved the world” and wept. They know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God sent God’s own Beloved into the world – not to condemn the world – but that the world might be saved. (John 3:16)

Saved by love. Not money or power. Saved by love. Not singularity or arrogance. Saved by love. Love stirs within the hearts of the Apostles. And it stirs within you and me. What Acts will you Apostles write today? What small acts of kindness — or resistance — will you proclaim with your lives this day?

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image : Rev. William Barber speaking at a Moral Monday rally on July 15, 2013 ; photo by Ted Buckner

giving away everything in our lunch box

yellow tin lunch box illustrated as a school bus
~ julie vieira ~ Leave a comment

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time | IHM Jubilee Eucharistic Celebration | July 27, 2024
Lectionary: 110

2 Kings 4:42-44
Psalm 145:10-11,15-16,17-18
Ephesians 4:1-6
John 6:1-15

Sisters, Brothers and Siblings, Hermanas y Hermanos: ¡Feliz Jubileo! Happy Jubilee!

Twenty-five years ago when I entered the IHM congregation as a novice, we stood in this chapel – at this altar – in the presence of the IHM president and community and expressed our desire to commit ourselves to God within the IHM mission. The then-president Virginia Pfau presented each of us a copy of the IHM Constitutions which are our rule of life. It sets out how we will live the liberating mission of God with one another on behalf of the church and world.

As Ginny handed us the Constitutions, she said a word or two. And then she said, “Take and enflesh the Constitutions”.

Enflesh the constitutions?? We were all taken aback. Those were strong words. Not just “read this” or “be inspired by this”, but enflesh the Constitutions. Make real with your very bodies the Constitutions. Make them alive and concrete in your life.

After receiving the Constitutions, we moved into the Eucharistic Rite and were invited, like every Eucharist, to take and become the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ.

Eat. Drink. Enflesh. Do this in memory of me. Comer. Beber. Encarnar. Hacer esto en memoria de mi.

Today’s readings proclaim this central message of our vocation as Christians. In the gospel, John tells the story of Jesus’ of the multiplication of loaves and fish. It is an awesome event.

But John tells us this story not so much to dazzle us with Jesus’ miraculous feats, but to symbolize what Eucharist means: Jesus the Christ not only sustains us with God’s own life but satisfies us abundantly and overflowingly.

We know the story well. A throng of people follow Jesus, wanting to see more strange and marvel-filled wonders. Jesus, on the other hand, just wanted a quiet, mountain-side retreat with his disciples. But now he’s got a crowd of thousands, and those thousands are hungry. The rest, as they say, is history. One blessing and a few loaves and fish later, and everyone has more than enough to eat with leftovers to boot.

While the miracle is, well, miraculous, there is perhaps an even more important thing that happens in this story. Let’s go back to the beginning for a moment when Jesus realizes that the people are hungry and asks if there is any food. John writes: “Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, [responds] to Jesus, [saying] ‘There is a [child] here who has five barley loaves and two fish …’” (John 6:9)

Imagine the scene. Thousands upon thousands of people tired, hungry, and perhaps even getting a little disruptive — as any hangry person would know! Among them was a child with his lunch box: five loaves and two fish. John tells us that the loaves were made of barley, hinting that the child was from a poor family for barley bread is the ordinary food of the poor. We know no other details; however, we can imagine that this food likely was the last of what this boy’s family had, with no idea where the next meal might come from.

Still, the child brings his five barley loaves and two fish to one of the apostles. Perhaps he tugs on Andrew’s robe and shyly unwraps the food. People nearby laugh and say how cute the child is for thinking foolishly that the lunch box has enough food to make a dent in the crisis at hand. But all the child knows is that food is needed, and that they have something to share.

It would have been understandable for the child to hide the lunch box and have just enough to feed his family. But instead, the child chooses to give it all away and to risk going hungry. All that child knew to do was to answer the call to, in the prophet Elisha’s words, “give to the people to eat”.

I do not believe that this quiet act of faith was lost on Jesus. For Jesus, too, would give everything he had, his own body and blood for the sake of a world hungering for a deeper life of meaning and connection with God.

As I ponder what it means to be jubilarians – women religious in the IHM Community for 25, 60, 70, 75, and 80 years – I can’t help but think of these women who came to the congregation with whatever gifts, desires, energy, and hopes that they had – a loaf of barley bread here, a fish there. None of us have enough in our lunch box to heal the wounds of the world – to ease suffering, to end racism, to protect the queer community, to heal the earth, to liberate the captive. Yet the call is no different to us as it was to that child some 2000 years ago.

Give to the people to eat. Dar a la gente para comer.

We Jubilarians and indeed all of us gathered here in person and online – of whatever age, gender identity, culture, language, relationship status or spiritual persuasion – every one of us is called to give what we have, to empty our lunch boxes, and to trust that in doing so, something good and beautiful for the world will unfold. Indeed, God honors each of our few loaves and fish, and then goes further and provides for us abundantly, even when the odds are stacked against us.

Our God is a God of Providence, a God who guides us and cares for us in “concrete and immediate ways” in “the least things to the great events of the world and its history”. (Catechism of the Catholic Church §303)

As our foremothers the Oblate Sisters of Providence say, “Providentia providebit”. Providence provides. Years ago, I asked Sister Mary Alice Chineworth, OSP, an Oblate Sister of Providence, what exactly this means. She said,

Providence Spirituality is dependence upon God as Provider of all our needs, including our spiritual welfare.… Whatever we have, we know that it is gift of the spirit, and we must use it wisely and share it generously…. [It] enables us, with total trust in God’s Providence, to bring joy, healing and the liberating redemptive life of the suffering Jesus to the victims of poverty, racism and injustice despite contradictions, prejudice and pain.

Each of us is called to give not only our gifts – a loaf of bread here, a fish there – but our very life for the world – just like the child and their lunch box … just like Jesus and his total gift of self.

Therefore, “I urge you,” as Paul says to the Ephesians, “live in a manner worth of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love.” (Ephesians 4:1-2)

Remember this: “take and become the body and blood of Jesus the Christ.”

Eat. Drink. Enflesh. Do this in memory of me. Comer. Beber. Encarnar. Hacer esto en memoria de mi..  

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photo : Dan Iggers on Flickr

drawing deeply from the well

Image of el monasterio de la Encarnación in Ávila, España by Julie Vieira (August 17, 2023)
~ julie vieira ~ Leave a comment

Memorial of Saint Teresa of Jesus, virgin and doctor of the church
Romans 8:14-17, 26-27
Psalm 33:2-3, 10-11, 18-19
John 4:5-15

Dear Sisters, Brothers, and Siblings — Happy Feast Day.

In August, I had the great delight and honor to visit la ciudad de Ávila in España. Each day I was there, I visited my favorite place, el monasterio de la Encarnación. I’d walk from the old town of Ávila down the fortified hill, and a few blocks through a neighborhood toward the monastery. Once I reached the street, Calle de la Encarnación, I could see a couple blocks away the magnificent statue of Teresa – you know the one, where she stands tall, walking staff in hand.

I would enter el patio de la Encarnación, an outdoor terrace just within the monastery walls. From where I sat on stone bench, I could see the very door through which Teresa entered the Carmelite Order in 1535. Each day, I sat there and wrote, eager to encounter Teresa and the God who so enraptured her heart. I waited and listened. I listened and waited. And then I waited some more. I figured, what better place than for divine inspiration?! I waited and listened. Nothing.

Finally, I gave up. I figured that if Teresa was going to be silent, so would I. I put away my notebook and pencil and walked out. But I couldn’t leave. So I started to wander around outside, down the street past the main entrance of the monastery. I followed the outer walls of Encarnacion, curious about the space that Encarnación occupied. It was not a short walk. The property was much more extensive than I ever imagined. I was getting tired, and the heat of the day was relieved only by the coolness radiating from the stones of the massive walls.

After what seemed like an impossible number of left-hand turns, I started to recognize things again, and up ahead I could see Calle de la Encarnación again. As I neared the crossroads, ready to take my final left to get back to the main entrance, I saw a sign. That’s right, a sign. A STOP sign to be exact. Below it were the words, “Convento de San José (Las Madres) Primero Fundación de Santa Teresa de Jesús”. Next to the words was an arrow. The arrow, slight though it was, pointed in the opposite direction of Encarnación.

It is then that I remembered. Teresa left. She left Encarnación. She left and she set out. She left what had been her home and her local community of many years. Familiar walls, familiar faces, familiar routine, familiar spaces to encounter God. She left. The statue that we love so much and that is replete with emotion and intensity and meaning. With walking staff in hand, Teresa is setting out to re-found the Carmelite order. Her back is to Encarnación, and her face is set like flint, heading towards San José, the first convent of the Carmelite reform.

The woman from today’s gospel is no different. She encountered Jesus not in a monastery but in a familiar place — Jacob’s well. The well dated back nearly 2 millennia to the time of Jacob in the land of Samaria, in the town of Sychar, “near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph” (John 4:5). It was familiar not only to the woman but to her ancestors who day after day, year after year, came to draw water.

Jesus presented the woman with a crossroads. He asked her to let go of the familiar and to draw water not from this spring that had served her and her people for years, but to draw living water, that is, water flowing from God’s endless spring of Wisdom. It is the Wisdom we hear about in our first reading, “I loved Her more than health and beauty; I preferred Her to the light of day, for Her countenance shone unceasingly.” (Wisdom 7:10)

The woman couldn’t believe what she was hearing from Jesus. “Who do you think you are?” she says to Jesus. (John 4:12). Perhaps she even wondered to herself, “Who do I think I am to receive this water?” Still, she waited and listened, longing for more.

And then she gets it.

She leaves her water jar behind and sets out. Her faith is being refounded – what it looks like, she’s not sure – but she sets out to live that refounding and share it with others.

Are we not at this same place? Are we not at a crossroads and being invited to leave the familiar and to set out for the new?

Even when the signs are clear, we don’t always know what to do or how to take a next step. When I stood at the crossroads – Encarnación to my left and the refoundation of San Jose on my right – I’m proud to say that I took the road most traveled. I turned left to Encarnación.

You see I love everything that Encarnación stands for. I love the peace and calm I feel. I love the cast-iron handle that I can grasp and pull open just as Teresa did some years ago. But I still had to go. I’d like to say that I set my face like flint and headed for San Jose, but instead I went into town, and sat in la plaza, surrounded by the night life of Ávila. I resigned myself to peanuts and beer.

It is then that Teresa came and sat down beside me. Her presence is as unmistakable to me as our communion of IHM saints “dwelling now in light yet ever near”.

“Go,” she said. From Encarnación to San Jose. Go. From the walls to the city, to the fields to the rock-strewn paths and the sun-scorched plains. Go.”

For Teresa to go, for the woman at the well to go, and for us to go, we must draw richly from the well of living water. We must leave behind the familiar, leave behind even the water jug that has served us so well. What does this look like?

I’m reminded of a few stories I heard over the past few days:

  • the couple in their 60s who overnight find themselves to be parents and grandparents as they adopt a young woman and her child as their own
  • the school board who chooses to welcome with open arms a student who is transgendered
  • the religious sister who places her body literally in the crossfire of warring nations in order to ensure peace and safety for all
  • the middle-aged mechanic who in the midst of anxiety and depression, chooses not to give up on themselves

This is what it looks like to have living water flowing through you – to be open to and to live into God’s invitation to life, even when it seems unfamiliar, absurd, unpopular, or terrifying.

What crossroads are we at today – as individuals, as families and religious congregations, as nations and an earth community? Where are the wells inside of us and around us from which we are called to draw living water?

Wait and listen.

Then go …

… from Encarnación to San Jose. Go. From the walls to the city, to the fields to the rock-strewn paths and the sun-scorched plains. Go.

image credit: julie vieira

the unknown God

~ julie vieira ~ Leave a comment

Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Lectionary: 293

Acts 17:15, 22—18:1
Psalm 148:1-2, 11-12, 13, 14
John 16:12-15

The past few weeks I’ve been working on a presentation at Visitation on my fave theologian, and the subject of my master’s degree, Karl Rahner. I will spare you the long list of reasons why I love Rahner. However I would be remiss if I missed an opportunity to mention Rahner’s insight into understanding God as Holy Mystery. God is the one who is “incomprehensible and impenetrable”. God is the nameless one, the infinite horizon.

Of course my ears perked up with today’s reading from Acts where Paul speaks about the Athenians’ shrine to “the unknown God”. Now I don’t want to be anachronistic in any way, but I do think there’s an interesting connection between the Athenians’ experience of the sacred as unknown and the emerging Christological sense of the sacred as mystery.

The Athenians liked gods – the major Olympian gods like Zeus and Athena and the minor gods like Pan and the Muses. They even paid homage to the titans. Athens was so inclusive and welcoming that their city boasted shrines to all kinds of deities beyond their own religious circle. They were “inherently hospitable to new gods, ideas, and interpretations” (source). The Athenians were also careful. They erected a shrine to “the unknown God” just to make sure they’d covered all their bases. For they did not wish to offend any deity, even one they did not know.

Paul rightly observes “that in every respect [they] are very religious” (Acts 17:22). What’s interesting to me is that he doesn’t make an issue of any of the shrines. He doesn’t try to bring his Christian message into dialogue with Artemis or Dionysius. Instead, he focuses on this one particular shrine to the unknown God. There’s something about the “unknownness” of this particular deity that Paul finds a connection with. He takes the opportunity to make the connection between this unknowable God, and the God whom he knows intimately. This God, he says, is in fact very much known – not “fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination” but a living God in whom “we live and have our being”, a God who makes Godself known through Jesus the Christ.

Some have read this passage as Paul pointing out their folly and reprimanding the Athenians for the foolishness of worshiping a deity that they did not know. But I don’t think so. Paul knew the ways of the Greek world – he spoke Greek and was well versed in Greek philosophy. There was something about the unknown God that resonated with him and compelled him to begin there, rather than with the very knowable (and rather fallible) deities of the Greek world.

Although Paul did not have the benefit 20th century philosophical concepts or theological language of Rahner, it’s clear that he also has had a fundamental experience of God as mystery – and God as revealed, knowable. He speaks of this throughout his preaching. He is passionate about sharing this with the Greeks, to help them make the connection between the unknown and the known.

In our life today, we have many things that remain unknown to us, not just God. There’s our health, our relationship⁠s⁠ – I don’t even know what I’m having for lunch today! I’d like to be able to flip a switch – from unknown to known, from hidden to revealed, but that’s not how mystery works. It’s something we have to not only live into, but embrace. It’s in the dance of mystery that we find our creativity, our passion, and our zeal.

Perhaps we can take a page out of Paul’s playbook. To respect the places of unknown and mystery that we find ourselves in and to also begin to move around it, start to find shapes and patterns, colors and textures in the midst of the unknown. In doing so, we begin to name what has been unnamable, reveal what has been hidden.

It doesn’t mean that it’s easy nor that it wont have discomfort, suffering or pain. In today’s gospel, Jesus promises that we are not alone in this and that we do not have to bear everything alone. The Spirit is truly with us.

As we “live and have our being” today, let us be on the look out experiences of the unknown and known – and not be afraid to dance with this mystery.

Image Credit: Kamil Feczko on Unsplash