September 27, 2015

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time - A Reflection by Fr. Leo

 

The Seversons lived next door when I was growing up.  They were Lutheran.  Dad was a doctor and their daughter Helen was about my age.  I remember coming home once and reporting to my mother that I told Helen she was going to go to hell because she wasn’t Catholic.  My mother was horrified, but I was only passing on what I was taught a block away at Blessed Sacrament grade school.  Back then the only beneficiaries of the Church were her members. We were the only true Church and the only way to salvation.  That was the Vatican I view of the world.  Since then we have been blessed with the teachings of Vatican II which teaches us that the beneficiaries of the Church should be all who come in contact, however distant, with her.  In fact, I remember a professor in theology saying that we thought the norm for salvation was in the Church, now we see the norm is outside the Church.  Not so comforting a thought, nor was Jesus’ words to his disciples who wanted to stop those who were casting out demons in Jesus name. “Let them,” Jesus says.  If they are not against us they are for us.

 

This us-them mentality is still a temptation today. While we have a more ecumenical spirit with other Christian Churches, we still have a ways to go in our openness to people of other religions, especially today the Islamic Faith.  It is easy for me to embrace the mysticism in other world religions.  I believe the experience and effect of the divine is the same for all humanity. We just find other ways of talking about the same thing. And I know the same is true of the Islamic faith, at least for those who too, reach higher levels spiritual consciousness.  What slows me down are two things.  One, my lack of knowledge and experience with the islamic religion, and second, the temptation to let what I see and read about ISIS bleed over into my generalized thoughts about Islamic people.  What I must remember is that even the leading Imams in different countries have said that Islam’s greatest enemy is ISIS.  The Islamic leaders in India have declared a fatwa against ISIS.  So it is clear that we cannot judge the Islamic faith on the actions of ISIS any more than we can judge Christianity on the bloody massacre of Jones Town. 

 

I think what we have to remember is that we are all children of God.  We all have the same basic desires for love, family and the dignity of work.  Deep in our hearts no one wants the divisions that divine us.  The parents of any child, of any nation hurt no less then we do when our children are sacrificed on the altar of war.  We need to embrace plurality as a good thing and open the boarders of our minds and hearts so that all humanity can live together in peace.  The immigrant should not be a foreigner, nor should they have reason to leave home to begin with.  The primitive us-them way of living needs to cease and we can get the ball rolling in our own embracing of the differences among us.  This is not to say we turn a blind eye to injustice, but we should look for the common among us and build a society where all are one, serving and living in the same Spirit God breathed into us from the beginning of creation.

 

Let us become aware of any us-them lurking in our own minds and hearts and strive though the power of Love to build unity and not division among all God’s people.  Like Moses, let us be glad the find the Spirit poured out on all humanity and rejoice when we find her in all peoples.