Mark 10

Here's one of my short reflections for my final essays for Fr. Dunne's class. It's on the end of Mark 10, one of my favorites from the Bible...

On a week-long summer conference called Catholics on Call, I heard the words of Mark’s Gospel anew. For one of our masses, we had the Gospel reading that comes from the end of Mark 10. It tells the story of a blind man who calls out to Jesus for healing. At first, many around him rebuke him and tell him to pipe down, and the disciples appear to pay no attention to his calls. However, Jesus stops in his tracks and requests that the disciples go get the man. Mark 10:49 sums up the power of this Gospel reading for me: “Jesus stopped and said, ‘Call him.’ So they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take courage; get up, he is calling you.’”

The reading continues with another great line from Jesus: He asks the man point blank, “what do you want me to do for you?” It is a powerful moment, especially considering the lowliness of the man and the reality that he was nearly ignored and passed over by the contingent. However, if we are to place ourselves in the story and consider such an encounter with Jesus, I do not even get to the point of answering Jesus’ question. I could certainly give Him a decent, truthful answer, but before I can face Jesus’ question, I first have to listen to the disciples, who very well might have been miffed that they had to stop their journey and retrieve this wretched man from the crowd. They take him and, in what I interpret as a rather forceful and stern exhortation, tell him to find courage, get on his feet, and answer the call of Jesus.

Whoa! This is a big step. Many of us believe we have firm, strong faith and actually try hard to answer Christ’s call. But there is always the lingering wonders about what we would actually do in such a situation. This passage invites us to such reflection. Rather than obsessing over what I would ask Jesus to grant me, I reflect on the strength asked of us if we are to face Jesus and present our wants and needs, which we should be doing in prayer anyway.

This man models the correct response. He jumps to his feet in joy, asks Jesus to cure his blindness, and Jesus heals him. The affirmation to his response is that Jesus tells him, “your faith has saved you” (Mark 10:52). This man has stood up on his faith and found salvation from blindness and the fullness of true salvation in Christ. What an example he is for us! I loved the disciples’ exhortation so much that I put it on a t-shirt. Take courage. Stand up. He is calling you.

Advent Reflection

Here is the reflection I gave at a prayer service earlier tonight. It's based on Matthew 11:2-11.

Matthew offers a lot to our advent prayer in this passage. To tap into the message of hope we hear in the Gospel, let’s work backwards through this narrative. Jesus’ words at the end of the passage praise John as a great prophet but place the least of the Kingdom of God above John. John was the last in a long line of prophets dating back through Moses and ancient Israel. The prophets brought God’s message to His Chosen People and are revered for the mediation that God entrusted to them. This all changed with Christ: He didn’t just bring God’s message and mediate on God’s behalf—Jesus brought God to humanity as a human. Through Himself, Jesus Christ brought the Kingdom into our midst, concluding the era of the Prophets and initiating the era of the Kingdom. John was the one to finish the prophets’ work, preparing the way for the Lord, and Christ came to renew His people and invite all of us into this Kingdom, where He offers the God who is Love to us in the most accessible way.

Earlier in the Gospel, the messengers from John the Baptist want to know if Jesus is this One who John is prophesying. Jesus points to the works he has wrought in His ministry: healing the blind, infirmed, leprous, and deaf; proclaiming the good news; and, raising the dead. Pretty impressive stuff. I’d say that’s a yes, Jesus is this guy John is talking about. Jesus also adds to his catalogue of credentials, “And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Hmm…

Let’s backtrack to the start of the passage. John has to send messengers to check in on this other prophet because he himself is in jail—King Herod locks John away for his criticism of the king’s relations with his sister-in-law. John’s sentence is unjust, and he is eventually beheaded at the pleasure of the royal court. But let’s focus on the captivity in this passage. John cannot discern the identity of this Jesus character because he is behind bars. The struggles of life hold us back from taking no offense in Christ and our practiced faith.

What are the things that we do that prevent us from seeing Jesus first-hand? For most of us, a lot of it has to do with busy-ness. We don’t make our faith a high enough priority in the busy schedules of our lives. We might make time for Sunday mass or a weekly hour-long Emmaus meeting, but our hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute faith so often becomes virtually Christ-less. We are held captive by the hecticness of life.

What stops us from seeing Christ for ourselves? For me, I struggle to actively place Christ in the minute-by-minute. The place where I can see it most is in relationships and the way people interact. The love of Christ comes alive in the opportunities we have in our daily encounters with one another, and nothing invites another's love more than to take the initiative in loving. I think it’s interesting to consider John’s messengers here. They go seeking confirmation from Jesus but return with the Word as missionaries.

It is up to us to know when to lean on our friends and family and fellow Christians to be the messenger-missionaries that share their witness of Christ with us to nourish our spirits. Along with the liturgy and its Word and Eucharist, our fellow believers and us come together through prayer like this and faith-sharing groups like our Emmaus communities to continue deepening our faith as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Advent is the time of preparatory waiting when we re-recognize the Incarnation, the coming of Christ, God becoming one of us. In this beautiful narrative of birth of a son to a compassionate carpenter and his mysteriously virgin wife, our hope is born in Christ. Let us appreciate the hope Christ brings and continue to explore the depth of mystery in His Word through our work together. May we take apart the prison bars holding us captive from fuller faith and look to the healing, good news, and resurrection—the hope—in Christ.

We're all trying.

As this semester draws to a close, it's clear to me how reflective it has been for me. Unfortunately, I have gotten to far into my head where my thought falls away from reflection and even further from prayer to being just thought. It loses too much of its transcendence and perspective.

I'm too quick to dive into the deep ends of my head when taking in my life that my experiences can hardly even happen before I'm overanalyzing them. It's frustrating and definitely not something I like about my current self.

Some of it will be eased by unplugging from the rigors of college life, which really kicks up a notch each year with the depths of commitment one layers upon himself. Falling gently and trustingly back into the embrace of family and the home I grew up in, even if it isn't as much home as it used to be because of the ways I've grown in other settings, is renewing and nourishing.

But upon return, just like coming back from any retreat, it will require some conscious effort and the right levels of being loose and easy to walk the path towards firmer peace.

The constant amid it all that keeps me riding steady and high, even if that has been slightly lower this semester, is my faith: the underlying prevalence of prayer (that should be more in the foreground), the regularity of weekly Adoration to reground myself in/with Christ, the community of the Folk Choir, the nourishment of the mass.

It is really in the mass that I have found most solace in this kind of lull. The thing I wish most about my spirituality is for a better ability to place Christ in the people and actions that make up my life and this world. The Body of Christ enfleshed in all of us as we gather for the mass is a beautiful opportunity for this.

As I look around at the people, as my increasingly well-informed and -formed mind takes in the positives and negatives of the liturgy I participate in, I am keenly aware of my own imperfections as well as all those swirling around me. And amid the depth of mystery and magnitude of love present in it all, I can't help but settle on a simple reality: We're all trying.

We might be lapsed in so many aspects of life and lived faith and spirituality, but something brings us to the mass. And for better or worse, we participate--lacklusterly, exhaustedly, emptily, blindly, rotely, or any other seemingly negative word one could conjure. But we're there. We come. We are drawn to Christ, in whatever imperfect liturgy or congregation or practice we have.

The Church is our outlet for seeking the fullness of Christ amid the imperfections of human effort. No matter what we do in our limited capacities to muddle the fullness of God, God still offered Himself fully in the Incarnation and Cross as God-become-man, and that offer continues forever. We find it in the Eucharist, in each other, in the Church. Look around your classroom or chapel or church--we're all trying in some capacity.

No matter the imperfections we embody each time we come together for mass or even just in the encounters with each other every day: whether consciously or unconsciously, we offer our broken selves up for renewal in the Eucharist, and Christ comes, without our meriting it, and offers to make us whole again.

We might not know exactly what we are doing; we might know exactly what we are doing. But somehow, in living and practicing our faith, we are trying. And God loves me. God loves us.