Fr. Frank Majka, SJ – The Bridge

Generous Love

Many times there occur instances of heroic bravery when someone with amazing selflessness comes to the aid of another person. There were countless examples of this when the World Trade Towers collapsed and, more recently, when firefighters and police responded to the chaos and dislocation caused by hurricane Sandy.

Sometimes such deeds are truly breathtaking, as when people rush into burning buildings to rescue trapped children or, to use a specifically religious example, when St. Maximilian Kolbe gave his life in exchange for the life of a fellow concentration camp prisoner who’d been condemned to die of starvation.

But many examples of generous love are less dramatic and closer to home. I know of a father who gave up promotion and advancement in his profession so that he could spend more time with his children as they grew up. I think of a family who adopted three physically challenged boys and gave them the attention and love they’d lacked in their previous environment. I can also think of people who care for their aging parents far beyond what might appear reasonable.

The fact is, examples of generous love are all around us and they inspire us, just as the generosity of the widow in the gospel impressed Jesus when she put into the temple treasury “all she had to live on” out of her love for God.

This season of Thanksgiving is a good time to thank God for the deep goodness, selflessness and generosity of people whose actions beautifully mirror the very generosity and love of God.

One Wish

We are creatures of our desires and wishes. They motivate us to do things or to refrain from doing them. Some of our desires are good while some are less so. A big part of spiritual growth is coming to know what our deepest desires are and how they fit with what God wants for us.

The blind man of Jericho didn’t have to think much when Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” He said right away, “I want to see!” He had only one wish, and it must have seemed impossible. But Jesus answered his request, and in taking away his blindness, Jesus changed the man’s life.

What would we say if Jesus met us one day and said, “What would you like me to do for you?” Would we name something that we have longed for but thought would never come to pass, something for ourselves or for someone else? As we ask, we might be surprised to discover an even more fundamental longing we hadn’t been aware of and begin to bring that to the Lord. And what might our family or our parish community ask for? (That could be a good conversation starter.)

The blind man asked Jesus for the gift of sight because he had faith that he could help him. Has our faith helped us name our deepest longings and given us the courage to bring them to Christ?

Free to Follow

We’ve all heard about the rich young man who came to Jesus filled with a generous spirit but went away sad. Actually, only Matthew says he was young; Luke says he was a “ruler” and Mark says only that he was rich. His age wasn’t the issue. His riches were.

When he asked Jesus what more he needed to do to enter eternal life besides keeping the commandments, Jesus told him to divest himself of his riches, give the money to the poor and follow him. It was an invitation to discipleship and companionship; but it made him sad, so he went away.

Why? Because at that moment, he didn’t own his riches — they owned him. Until he got free of them, he couldn’t answer the Lord’s call. Maybe, eventually, they lost their hold on him and he came back to follow Christ. We don’t know. But the Holy Spirit is always at work.

However this incident eventually played out, it reminds us that we not only need to desire eternal life — which isn’t just about going to heaven but also about living in God’s friendship here and now — we also need to be free to answer Christ’s invitation.

So, if we have attachments and dependencies that stand in our way, we need to confront them. And they may be different from one day to another or one year to another.

We don’t have to do this alone, though, if we believe that God’s Spirit helps us in our weakness. And we can hope that God will continue to draw us towards the freedom to answer his Son, even if it takes a while.

Some Places

A high school newspaper I ran across recently had a story about a student trip to Germany. One sentence in it brought me up short: “Other places visited include Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich and Dachau, where they saw a concentration camp.”

I guess I was looking for something more about that last place. Were the students surprised, bored, saddened, confused or made thoughtful? The article didn’t say. Maybe for them Dachau was just another stop between museums.

I started thinking. Most of the places we’ve been to probably don’t “address” us (to use the phrase of the 20th century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber) in any significant way. But some of them do, especially if we understand what we are really seeing and what happened there. They not only speak to us, they demand something from us.

Perhaps that was missing in the experience of those students. Perhaps no one had really explained to them what they were seeing, and why, for instance, Dachau or Auschwitz will always be remembered as places of cruelty, suffering and sadness and will always make a claim on us to insure that such will never exist again.

Or maybe they actually did know and feel the site addressing them but the writer of the story simply wasn’t on the trip. I’d like to think that was the case.

But leaving the students’ experience aside, can we recall any places that have addressed us? What responses do they ask from us and how have we, individually or with others, answered them?

Welcoming the Least

The imperial Roman world was full of statues, not just of the gods but also of the emperor. And when people honored the emperor’s statue or image they were honoring the emperor himself. Likewise, if they did not respect the emperor’s image, they were insulting the emperor. Perhaps Jesus was thinking along these lines when he told the disciples that if they welcomed a little child, they welcomed him.

The Pharisees seemed unable to see the majority of people as worthy of welcome, referring to them as “this rabble who know not the Law” (John 7:49). But Jesus gave a welcome to all, especially those who didn’t count for much in his society: children, women, the poor, sinners and the sick. He saw everyone as made in God’s own image and likeness. He saw them as his Father saw them.

Unlike Jesus, we seem to have a hard time grasping the fact that everyone deserves our welcome, even the annoying, the arrogant, the boring, the superficial, and those who push our buttons in a whole variety of ways. We ask Jesus, “Do we really have to?” And he answers that he wasn’t kidding when he said that when we welcome the least, we welcome him.