Fatal Memory

In Roman Law there is the principle, “One witness is no witness.” Police investigators will tell you how unreliable “eyewitness” testimony is. Human memory is not computer memory: store and recall. Human memory is fluid. Memories form and constantly transform. Often the transformation of the memory is driven by our emotions. We improve things we like. We make things we dislike even worse than they were. And some things we simply forget. It seems to be a bit of a circle. Our emotions shape our memories, and our memories (no matter how erroneous) shape our emotions. 

We see this played out perfectly in today’s first reading. The Israelites only two months into the journey and already they “grumble” or perhaps better “murmur.” It’s that low rumble you get among the discontent.  But the source of the murmur is collective erroneous memory. They look back on their time in Egypt and they, perhaps unconsciously, cherry pick the memory or the life. They remember the food (better than it was). They remember shelter. But that have forgotten the slavery. And you can bet that in the group there were those who encouraged the erroroneous memory. There are always those who wish to paint the past as somehow better than the present. 

While it is good for us to learn from the past, we must be very careful not to dwell there. Every moment spent dwelling in the past is a moment lost in the present. Our short lives march on, continuously moving forward, like the people of Israel in the Exodus. 

Our brains were designed by God not to store but to process information: to learn, to evaluate, to choose. It’s what our brains do best. It is the choosing that makes us human. It is the choosing that makes us moral. Each day is filled with choices, and signs of the presence of God. If we spend our time making the right choices today, we have no time to yearn for a yesterday that never was. 

The First Witness

Shakespeare’s Mark Antony told us, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” And sadly what lives after is not the evil someone actually did,  but errors that have simply been passed from person to person, generation to generation. 

Today the Church celebrates the saint who scripture tells us was the first first to witness the empty tomb, the first to see the risen Christ (Jn. 20). And yet when we say the name that is not the first thing we think. For far too many Christians the first thought is prostitute. The saint is Mary Magdalene. 

There is NOTHING in the Bible that says she was a prostitute. 

As best we can find, somewhere in the Middle Ages people began to mix up the story of Mary Magdalene and the sinful woman of Luke 7. What is even more interesting is that the Bible never says what the sin of the woman in Luke 7 was. Perhaps it says more about us than her that in our minds we turn “sinful woman” into “prostitute.” Greek had plenty of words for sexual sin but that is not what St. Luke says. The word he uses is much more generic it literally means someone who has missed the mark. Why do we jump to the conclusion that if a woman committed a sin it had to be fornication or prostitution? Is that the only sin a woman could commit?

This past week I traveled back to my home town and was reminded of how flawed human memory is. Many things were not as I remembered – not because they had changed but because I did not remember accurately. 

A part of the human condition is the falability of human memory, and as Shakespeare reminds us, another part of the human condition is our fascination with sin. Whether it is the temptations we personally experience or stories of the sins of us, we find ourselves drawn in. Good is boring but sin is interesting, even if it’s made up.

In 1969 the Church did what it could to try and uncouple Mary Magdalene from the woman in Luke 7, but like many good things, that news never made it to the world at large. Today let us remember and acclaim St. Mary Magdalene for what scripture says she actually did, and not for what we think she did. 

Christian Hospitality

Both the first reading and the gospel today stories of hospitality. In the first reading the LORD is said to appear to Abraham as three men.For us Christians this has been interpreted as the Holy Trinity. In the gospel, it is clearly God, Jesus Christ, who is the guest. 

In the first reading Abraham sees three men and runs to greet them, not waiting for them to come and ask for help. This theme is further developed in the book of Exodus when God commands the people,

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

The word for stranger has a variety of meanings: stranger, foreigner, alien.  It refers to a person on the road who turns off, in need of assistance. 

The word “wrong” here is a broad term covering a wide variety of ways a person can be mistreated. It may remind us of the golden rule, to treat others as we wish to be treated, not so to anyone else what we would not want done to ourselves. 

The word oppress presents the image of literally pressing the person down. We are forbidden from doing anything that makes the alien feel any way lower than us, less than us..

In the resigns today Abraham and Martha are the models with which each of us must mesure our own behavior. 

We live in a time when there are many voices who would encourage us to fear. They feed our fear of the stranger, the unknown. As Christians, we are called to be guided, not by the natural, but by the supernatural. We are called to rise above our gut reactions.

Does a country have a right to secure its borders? Yes. But can we use any and all means to do so? No. 

As Christians, we should call on our leaders to use only those means which are moral, those means which do not violate the natural rights and basic human dignity of the person. Yes, that complicates the matter and reasonable people can disagree about what is moral and what is immoral.  That does not mean that which should not strive for the truth. The truth is that we are required to treat every human being with exactly the same dignity we wish to receive from others. We cannot place a person in conditions we would not find acceptable for ourselves. 

At the end of the day, at the end of this life, our attitude toward the stranger, the alien, the foreigner will be one of the many things on which we will be judged. These readings encourgsre us to judge ourselves now, and make changes as needed 

There is always a yoke

We perceive freedom as the ability to do whatever we wish, to not be controlled. 

The readings today remind us that we are always wearing some yoke. 

In the first reading God is preparing to rescue the people of Israel from the yoke of slavery to the Egyptians. 

If we look honestly at ourselves, the slavery we often experience is the slavery to our “feelings.” Our feelings that are in turn tossed around by the news and social media that we consume. We read or hear, and we react. All someone has to do is use the right buzzwords and we jump, at least inwardly. Even our bodies can jerk us around. Our blood sugar drops; our mood shifts. Our backs ache; we become short tempered. We are yoked. 

In the Gospel Jesus tells us that there is a path to true freedom. To be truly free we put on His yoke. True peace is found not by responding to our feelings but by being yoked, and guided by the person of Jesus Christ. 

When we wake up in the morning, before we do anything else, can we choose to put on the yoke of Jesus? As we walk though the day, when we feel the tug of old yokes pulling towards the unchristian word or action, we should feel the always stronger pull of the yoke of Jesus, turning us toward the right path. 

We will be tempted to take it off. The old yoke is familiar and in some way more comfortable. The yoke of Christ will feel awkward,,  but only at first. Over time it can become, as Jesus describes it, “easy.” As easy to wear as our favorite pair of shoes. 

The difference is that the shoes over time mold themselves to us. With the yoke of Christ, we are molded to it. 

Before you take another step, stop now and put on the yoke of Christ. 

Where we focus

If you attend a mass in Spanish, you are likely to hear some people say an acclamation where the host and the chalice are shown:

Señor. Mío, y Dios Mio My Lord, and My God

This is how one culture chooses to remeber St. Thomas.

As English speakers, if I say “Thomas”, you probably think “doubting.” This is how we think of him. 

Without even realizing it, each of us absorbs or culture, the good and the bad. We copy, often without thought. 

As Christians we are called to think. We are called to question. We are called to evaluate. We are called to choose. 

We can be more than our culture. We can choose what we focus on. We can focus on the bad or we can focus on the food. We can continue to focus on St. Thomas’s doubt. Or we can remember St. Thomas for his faith and for his evangelization of what we now call India and the surrounding area. 

By our choices, we show who we really are. 

How small is our faith?

The two readings today from Genesis and the Gospel of St. Matthew were not chosen to go together. In Ordiinary time we read through the books of the Bible in what is called lectio continuo. 

But by providence the two readings do carry one common theme – small faith. 

In the Gospel we have the disciples in the boat with Jesus during the storm. Jesus responds to them with a question and a statement, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith.” In the first reading we have Lot who is paralyzed by fear. We are told that he and is family have to be “seized by the hand” and led our of Sodom. He is then told to do two things. We tend to remeber the first and forget the second. 

Don’t look back or stop anywhere on the Plain.

He willingly accepts the first “don’t look back.” But he is too frightened to obey the second “don’t stop anywhere on the plain.”  Instead he begs to be allowed to go to a nearby place. Twice we are told that it is “small.” Instead of being able to trust and go far. Lot prefers small and close by. His fear limits him. 

How often, even when we are in a bad place and know we need to change, are we like Lot? We fear to really venture out. We are willing to change, willing to move, but only as far as absolutely necessary. We are afraid to dream big. We are afraid to really step away from what we know. 

We call faith a theological virtue, because we believe it is not the result of what we do, but is a gift from God. The first action is His. He pours the gift of faith into our hearts and it is never small. It becomes small when we allow it to be covered over and pressed down by our fear. That fear can take many shapes but it is always fear. 

The readings today invite us to look inside ourselves and examine our faith. Are we allowing it to unfold and fill us? Or are we allowing our fears (our fears of the new, the unknown) to compress our faith to make it small, to lock it away in a tiny corner of our soul?

Unleash the faith that God has planted in you, and you will be amazed at where it can lead.

How a Christian takes control?

Who would have ever guessed that we would live in a time when we could simply speak and Alexa would turn on our lights or play our favorite song. When we were children you had to be in front of the TV on a certain night at a specific time to watch your favorite shows. Now we can watch almost anything whenever we choose. With pod coffee makers we can each have exactly the coffee we want when we want it. And fruits and vegetables are available regardless of season. We are apparently in control like never before. 

But there is one thing over which we appear to have no more control than we had a century ago — the self. If anything, we have less self control. 

Recently we have begun to recognize the negative effects of absence of self-control and “mindfulness” has become the latest popular solution. 

As Christians, we know that real control has nothing to do with controlling our environment. The control that leads to peace starts inside. It begins with a single relationship, the relationship of the individual with Jesus. It begins when we accept the idea that there is a God and that God loves us so much that he came down and lived a truly human life to be with us, to walk with us. The hard part is how we are supposed to walk with him. 

Many people love images of Jesus walking along beside us. That, however, is not the gospel. In the gospel we are told that our place is not in front or beside but behind. Jesus says, “Follow me.” And this is where we start to react, to rebel.  In the abstract, we are ok with being followers. But in reality, we want him to help with our projects. The idea of us being the assistants who walk behind him and help with his projects is not very attractive.

Following is exhausting. If you’ve ever had to do it, either on foot or in a car, you know that it is hard work - constantly making sure that you keep an eye on the person you are following. 

In today’s gospel the disciple says to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.”  The gospel teaches us that, if we want true peace, the path is simple but not easy. We stay behind Him. Wherever he leads, we follow. In a world filled with distractions, it is easy for us to loose sight of Him. This is the only control that really matters. The self-control to let Him be in control. Luckily, for those of us who are baptized, we have a GPS, the Holy Spirit, to always help find our way. 

Today let us constantly follow wherever He goes.