REFLECTION

THE CALL TO BE SHEPHERDS

José Mario Nieto

This Sunday’s gospel talks about Jesus the Good Shepherd (Jn 10:11-18). We are very familiar with this image of Jesus. We have seen plenty of drawings in churches and others places of Jesus carrying a sheep on his shoulders. This image that seems delicate and adorable reflects a profound reality that entails a lot of effort and a constant care from the shepherd.

During the summer of 2013, I had the great opportunity of making my second trip to Holy Land. During my stay there I came to know people who worked as shepherds. They explained to us the difficulty of being a shepherd nowadays. The most difficult thing, they said, is to make the sheep hear their voices amidst all the noise that the busy city has. Even on the mountains some sounds can make the sheep nervous, because they are very sensitive to sharp and loud noises. In order to make the sheep recognize the voice of the shepherd and become familiarized with it, he has to take the sheep on his shoulders and sing or talk for a period of time while walking and carrying the weight of the sheep around. The shepherd will do that with those sheep that have a hard time following him or those who are less domesticated.

At the end of the day, the shepherd will be very tired and, of course, smell like the sheep. This is precisely the characteristic that Pope Francis mentioned two years ago in one of his homilies regarding what a good shepherd is. “This I ask you: be shepherds, with the ‘odor of the sheep’, make it real, as shepherds among your flock,” he famously said to priests during Holy Thursday.  Although he was speaking directly to priests, I wonder: Aren’t we all called to be shepherds? Aren’t we all called to take care of those around each of us?

Do you remember Cain’s answer to God’s when He questions him about his brother Abel; am I my brother’s keeper? Well, yes, we are! We are our bother and sister’s keepers. Therefore we are all called to “shepherd” those in need, to the point of “smelling” like them. As imitators of Jesus the Good Shepherd, we should ask ourselves: how do I take care of my brothers and sisters? And how much effort do I put in leading them to a safe place with Jesus? Am I willing to carry those who are in need even when this requires giving up my time and pleasures?

I hope this image of the Good Shepherd becomes an incentive for all of us, to follow Jesus and lead also others to Him.

MICHAEL WOLFE ORDAINED TO THE DIACONATE

On Saturday, April 18, Michael Wolfe (a member of the Community of Saint Paul) was ordained as a transitional deacon by Archbishop Jerome Listecki together with his two classmates studying for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and two members of the Conventual Franciscans.  Members and friends of the CSP, as well as Michael's family were present to support and celebrate with him. During the next year, he will continue his studies and formation to the priesthood, as well as continuing to serve at St. Paul the Apostle Parish in Racine, Wisconsin (his teaching parish as a seminarian). 

Congratulations to Michael, his classmates, and the Conventual Franciscans!  

REFLECTION

THE MAT

Martí Colom

In the second chapter of the Gospel of Mark we find the story of the paralytic lying in a mat who is being carried to Jesus by four men (Mark 2:1-12). Jesus cures him, saying that his sins are forgiven: the paralysis that prevented him from walking him was his own sin. Why, at the end of the story, once the man has been healed, does Jesus tell him to pick up his mat (Mark 2:11)? We might ask ourselves, why would he need it now that he can walk? What’s more, why does the reference to the act of picking up the mat appear not once, but three times (verses 9, 11 and 12)? It is obvious that Mark intends, with this insistence, to underline that when leaving the presence of Jesus, he who had been cured of his paralysis carried with him the mat on which he arrived. Why is this important?

Let us explore two responses: First (and this is a very speculative explanation) we can imagine that, implicitly, Jesus is inviting the person who had been paralytic to do for others what those four men did for him. As if he was saying: “Pick up your mat, so that it may be useful to others as it was to you, but now you can be one of those that carry it.”

On the other hand, to pick up the mat is the gesture that reveals that the former paralytic’s new awareness of his past is complete. He does not try to run away from the past by leaving the mat thrown in some corner. True healing is not about erasing every trace of our selfish pasts, nor about burying our errors in oblivion, it is about integrating them into our story. “Pick up your mat” means: be aware of who you have been. Knowing full well, however, that our sins do not define us anymore. That is why Jesus told the man to pick up his mat and the text goes on to narrate how he “took up the bed” (Mark 2:12): it is no longer his. Or perhaps it was, but only in the sense that it belonged to his past. In this sense it is good to carry our mats without misgivings; being aware that they do not define our present. Picking up the mat is to integrate completely our past experience – without making of its negative aspects the decisive factors of our present and future lives.

REFLECTION

 

 

EASTER: THE WOMEN, THE ROCK, THE WAY (AND A FLAGON WITH SPICES).

Martí Colom

 

            On the way to the tomb, walking under the first sunlight from Sunday’s dawn, the three women asked themselves who would roll back for them the huge stone from the entrance of the sepulcher.

            Yet, they kept moving.

            They brought with them a flagon with spices to anoint Jesus’ body. They knew that between them and the deceased there was a massive rock.

            But they walked on.

            They could have stayed in the city, mourning in resignation, telling each other: “It would be beautiful to anoint his body, but it is useless to go: a tremendous stone blocks up the access and prevents us from reaching him. Let us stay here, and cry.” But they did not. Dawn came and they left the city, on their way to the tomb.  In spite of the rock.

            They were not smarter or more spiritually shrewd than the rest of the disciples. All of them had heard from Jesus’ lips his foretelling of the Resurrection, but they carried spices for a dead man. They weren’t sharper, or holier. Maybe they loved him a bit more. And perhaps that is why they walked. Guided by an unspoken instinct made with a mixture of affection, hope and doubt.    

“What shall we do with the stone?”

They climbed the dusty trail knowing that they were approaching a large rock that they could not move, but they kept on nonetheless.

Maybe that is all they could do. If they had stayed still in the city they would have died of sorrow. They had more doubts than certainties, but somehow they understood that it is always better to walk amid doubts that to decide beforehand not to take the first step. The rock did not kill their wishes.

And it was because they went to the tomb, filled with hesitation, to look for one who was deceased, that they could see the stone rolled back. Then they were the first ones to hear, from that young man, that their teacher lived and lives. The Easter of Jesus sprouted in their hearts.

I bet that when they left, in love with life, they forgot somewhere in the dust the flagon with the spices. Maybe they left it half buried, useless and absurd, at the foot of the enormous rock.

 

Travesías y Sueños from Casa San José, Cochabamba (Bolivia)

Daniel, Rodrigo, Abraham, Juan Alberto, Luís, Pedro and Juan Daniel are the boys who created and star in Travesías y Sueños (Crossroads and Dreams), the new book that Casa San José introduces to you today. This is the third book that Casa San José has published.  The authors and illustrators of the several short stories in these colorful works are the children themselves.  

For the production of Travesías y Sueños, and so that they can share their lives with us in a subtle and creative way, we gave the floor to each of these boys, who before had been in the streets. This creative process was initiated by transforming their life stories into fantastic tales that were developed in a collaborative workshop in which the boys of la Casa became the creators and protagonists (main characters) of the stories.

REFLECTION

EAST OF KIDRON

Martí Colom

It is not hard to imagine Jesus sitting on an bank of the Mount of Olives, maybe with his back against the trunk of a sturdy tree, perhaps with a sprig of rosemary on his lips, looking, across the Kidron Valley, at the breathtaking view of the temple, with the sun shining on its perfect walls and huge blocks of yellowish stone.

The temple that Jesus observes is quite new: Herod the Great began to lift it some twenty years before the birth of the son of Mary, and its construction lasted until recently. Thus Jesus is seeing a building that has just been completed, in all its glory and radiance, a structure designed to impress and provoke admiration, another large edifice of a king who has loved ambitious architectural projects (like Caesarea by the Sea or his palace in the fortress of Masada). With this magnificent temple Herod intended to leave the final imprint of his own name and a permanent reminder of his long reign in the city called holy. Herod was a remarkable politician who managed to stay in power for over thirty years thanks to both shrewdness and brutality. By building the temple he, whose Jewish identity had always been questioned because of his Edomite origin, wanted to win the support and appreciation of the people and of the powerful Sadducee party.

 

What nobody knows yet is that the temple will not last a century, and that in the year 70 the wrath of Rome will demolish Herod’s great project. Now, when Jesus of Nazareth looks at its defiant walls with concern, the temple seems destined to remain here for a thousand years.

What does Jesus think? What does he feel? Let's imagine it: Jesus suffers. He opposes everything this temple represents. Throughout a long personal itinerary that took him from his native Galilee to spend time with John the Baptist in the desert, and then back to Galilee, now he clearly sees the incoherence, the absurdity, the distortion of the faith that this temple embodies. In the fertile lands of Galilee Jesus has grasped that the Spirit of God is present in every person and in daily life. He has understood that all exclusions are manmade and only serve the interests of those who wish to impose their will on the rest. Jesus has chewed the verses of Isaiah in which the prophet speaks for God saying, “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats… learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:11, 17).

And now this new temple disfigures again the compassionate face of God, poisoning its tenderness, masking its sweetness. The temple is conceived as a series of separate spaces that sharply divide the world of the “sacred” from that of the “mundane”, when in fact this beautiful world and everything in it is God's work! Jesus knows that the well-defined areas of the temple, ever more exclusive (the courtyard of the gentiles, the space for men, for the priests, the holy of holies...) serve to reduce men and women to the stature of children or even worse, slaves. The temple is a monument to fear, yet God is a breath of hope. And worse still: the temple is also a lucrative business where some take advantage of the sincere faith of the people.

Jesus suffers. East of Kidron.

This vignette of a tired, even outraged Jesus, sitting and watching with pain the temple from the Mount of Olives, provides an image to indicate that there are still today other "Kidron rivers": they are the lines that define where do we stand in relation to religious power. Maybe they will not be a stream or a mountain, but they are present in our decisions, in our way of looking at the world, in our hearts. It remains very important, if the experience of Jesus matters to us, to be able to remain always east of Kidron.

East of Kidron we realize that all spaces are God’s, not just the temples. More so, east of Kidron we learn that very often the paraphernalia of the great shrines is of little help to the liberation of those who open themselves to God in their hearts, being able to see and recognize God in others, in human situations of joy or pain, in the streets, on the road. East of Kidron we learn not to trust puritan views that promote sharp separations between saints and sinners. We fear, east of Kidron, the attraction of magical places: and we fear it because we know that when someone decides that this or that space is a promised land, soon others will say that it is “my” promised land where “you” have no right to live. And in the process, once again, we will have forgotten that all land is holy. East of Kidron we sense that the splendor and the magnificence of our buildings are projections of the importance that we would like to have, but inaccurate readings of God’s soul. God loves discretion and simplicity. Huge temples do not speak about God’s goodness; they speak of man’s arrogance, of our delusions, of our need for admiration and of our power struggles. East of Kidron we grow in relationship with a God that cares deeply for all people. East of Kidron we decide not to seek refuge in artificial languages, in affected gestures or in pretentious religious titles; all these would soon become reasons for us to move away from people, with the excuse of getting closer to God. East of Kidron we use everyday language, we show ourselves as we are, we live without hierarchies and we know that we get closer to God as we get closer to others. East of Kidron there is a garden without walls, an open space where everyone is welcomed. There, nothing protects us and nothing asphyxiates us. East of Kidron we find the land of men and women that want to live their dignity in freedom, as adults.

Understanding the Process of Family Reintegration of the Children of Casa San José (Cochabamba, Bolivia)

Editor's Note: Recently, several Agora XXI blog entries have acquainted our readers with the background and present activities at Casa San José in Bolivia.  The present article gets to the hopeful heart of the matter: reuniting the children with their families in conditions that improve the likelihood of successful family life, and some of the difficulties encountered.

Casa San José has, as its principal goal, the reintegration of street children and adolescents from Cochabamba into their families.  In dealing with agencies that take in minors (such as in our situation with street children), and which pursue their reintegration into their families, the Bolivian government asks through the Children and Adolescent Court that the families complete a series of requirements and thereby demonstrate that they are suitable for the return of the children.  As part of the process the Casa San José social worker prepares a status report and tries to explain to the children about the legal proceedings that, at times, can be complex and involve many, seemingly endless, steps in Children’s Court. This formal process often delays the assimilation of children. Therefore the children, despite our patient efforts to explain all of this to them, are often bewildered, frustrated and demoralized.