As we hear about Jesus preaching in his native town, and as we hear the calls that Paul and Ezekiel received, a lot questions came to my mind: (1) Are we able to see the presence of Christ in others? (2) Do we recognize the way God speaks through others? (3) Do we recognize and hear the prophets of our own day?
In a lot of ways, we hear of rejection in our readings today. The people of Israel reject the message of Ezekiel because he speaks God’s words. They are rebelling against God and his message. Ezekiel preached the same general message as God’s other prophets in the Old Testament: faithfulness to God’s word as revealed in Sacred Scripture; love of God; love of neighbor; and care for the needy and the oppressed. But, often, we need to get past our own prejudices, our own concerns, and our own self-centeredness to hear God’s message: that was something the people of Israel were unable to do.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul states that he is content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints for the sake of Christ. Paul realizes that when he is weak, he is strong. Paul is trying to say that when we embrace Christ’s Good News of with all our strength and with all our being, we will suffer and will be aware of our weaknesses. Paul is aware that the more we embrace Christ and his way, the more our words and our actions will speak about God and his love.
Ultimately, it does not matter to the prophet if his message is rejected or not. What matters most is that Ezekiel, Paul, Jesus and the messengers of God in our modern era speak the word of God. However, too often, we reject that word because we don’t want to recognize that God is speaking to us in the ordinary moments of life. That is why we priests need a spiritual director who can help us discern God’s will and help us see the ways God is speaking to us in our lives.
I remember that when I was studying to be a lay missionary in the 1990s, I picked up an old tattered book written in the 1939 that called out to me; it was entitled Sorrow Built a Bridge. This book told the story of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, an amazing story of how a woman responded to the presence of God in her life and how God called her to the Catholic faith. Rose was born in Massachusetts in 1851, the daughter of the famous American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote the book The Scarlet Letter, a book about the Puritans in colonial America that many of us read in either high school or college. From reading this biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, my sense is that she grew up with her family in a very positive environment, but perhaps an environment that could have been more loving and nurturing. By the time Rose was 20 and had married George Lathrop, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly magazine, both her parents were deceased. After five years of marriage, her son was born, but he died at the age of five from diphtheria. This brought great sorrow into her life. Ten years after his death, Rose and her husband entered the Catholic Church. However, Rose’s marriage was not a happy one, as her husband battled greatly with alcoholism. Through the consent of her confessor, Rose separated from her husband. In the challenges she faced in life, she felt God calling her to become trained as a nurse and to work with cancer patients in New York City. However, this was the late 19th century, a time when cancer patients were shunned and looked down upon, similar to AIDS patients in the United States in the early days of that disease. After her husband’s death in 1898, Rose became a Dominican sister, establishing the Dominican Congregation of St. Rose of Lima, also known as the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. Rose took the name Mother Mary Alphonsa, She and her congregation of sisters established a center for cancer patients in Hawthorne, New York. Father Gabriel O'Donnell, the Dominican priest who is the postulator for her cause for sainthood states that service to Christ's poor did not mean that as a woman of culture, education, and social status, she would just give out of her abundance and not go beyond the surface. On the contrary, she lived among the sick and the poor, establishing a place where they could live in dignity and cleanliness to face their final days on earth. She did not feel divided from them by class. She and her religious sisters saw themselves as servants. The residents were given their love, care, and concern. Out of the daily reality of her life, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop saw God’s presence, she heard his call, and she responded to God out of that reality. She could have felt rejected and angry, she herself could have rejected God, but in her sorrow and in her struggles, she converted to Catholicism and she heard God’s call to serve him and to serve others.
We may legitimately feel a lot of different emotions right now coming out of the pandemic. We may not be sure what tomorrow will bring. We may feel uneasy about how the world has changed. But God is still here with us. He has never left us. His presence calls out to us. As our parish activities resume throughout the summer and at the beginning of the new school year, we have a lot of opportunities in front of us. Even if some of us feel afraid or rejected, God calls out to us in the midst of that reality. Even in the midst of the social struggle our society has gone through this past year, even with the division and tension our society is experiencing right now, even as we see others backing off from their life of faith, we are called to persevere and to respond to God in our lives. We here at St Jude will be with you every step of the way. We here will continue to journey as a community of faith.
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