Tag: Jeannette de Beauvoir

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It’s easy to think, sometimes, that our lives are on a steady and pretty much predictable—even boring—course. That the days are standard-issue: we get out of bed, do our morning routines, go to work, see the same people, come home again. Our lives are punctuated by events—birthdays, moments of career advancement, new relationships, even expected deaths—that are themselves as routine as the contexts in which they nest. We even complain, sometimes, at how unexciting things can seem to be.

And then in a single searing moment that all changes.

I’ve been reminded of that lately when considering the news. Mass shootings at nightclubs, at places of worship, at a yoga studio: normal people living out normal lives that are unexpectedly and forever altered, shattered, even ended. Wildfires in California wiping out entire neighborhoods. The most active and powerful hurricane season ever in both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

And it only takes a moment, a second even, for everything to change—forever. Life is inalterably different. Whether it’s a road accident, a shooting, a sudden storm, a wildfire, you find yourself wanting to go back in time, take a different route to the grocery store, decide to not go dancing that evening after all, call in sick to work. How many times have you wished for a do-over, from the simplest of difficulties like biting down on the peanut that chipped your tooth, to the most horrible of scenarios, like the moment you found out your nephew overdosed and died? If I could just go back five minutes….

One of the hallmarks of life is it unpredictability, and part of that deal is we have to behave and think and do as if it weren’t going to happen—because no one can live in constant fear of what “might” be. We all have to get on with our lives; the rest is up to God. That’s what Luke is talking about in today’s Gospel reading. “As it was in the days of Noah,” Jesus says, “so it will be in the days of the Son of Man; they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Similarly, as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building; on the day when Lot left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all.”

That’s a pretty bleak picture, isn’t it? Everything was just fine… until it wasn’t. Eating and drinking, marrying, going about one’s usual everyday activities with no notion that it was all about to end. It’s a little like watching a horror film you’ve seen before: you’re willing the actor to not open that door, because you know what’s behind it.

But it’s not the same as the door in a horror film, is it? Because the second part of the passage tells us that there’s something far more important than the lives we’ve grown so attached to. When Jesus returns, it will be with that same suddenness. You won’t have time to go and pack a bag, or call a friend or relative: it will happen in an instant.

And that’s the real message: knowing as we do that anything can happen at any time—including the return of Christ—we need to be prepared. We might not be able to pack our clothing up, but there are things we can do to be ready. Is there someone you need to apologize to? Do it now; don’t wait. Does someone need to know you love them? Tell them now. Are you feeling angry about something that happened a long time ago? Let it go now.

And do the things that are what will help you be ready for whatever lies ahead. Pray. Go to Mass and confession. Read scripture. Follow the Gospel edicts and take care of the poor, the lonely, the hungry. Do all the things you keep telling yourself that you’ll get to eventually but never really seem to manage.

Because if the current news and the Gospel have one thing in common, it’s this: do it now. You may not be the person who decides at what point you won’t be able to do—or say—whatever you feel is unfinished. Accepting and living that acceptance is the best way to keep regret away and be as ready as possible for whatever the future holds.

Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.

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Have you ever seen a surgical team scrub up before an operation? It puts mere handwashing to shame! It’s a good thing, of course, that the team puts so much effort in, and there’s an excellent reason for its rigid cleansing requirements.

Cleansing has also always been important in religious traditions, both for its literal use (becoming clean, avoiding disease) and for the less-literal connections to being clean before God. In fact, some sort of ritual cleansing appears in nearly every world religion.

Rituals are an essential part of religion. They allow the people of God to participate in community life united both historically and geographically—over time and space—in a manner designed to uphold orthodoxy, draw diverse members together, and mark important moments in the life of the Church. But rituals are designed by humans, and therefore can take on a life of their own, to the point where the ritual becomes more important than the reason and goals behind it.

That’s what is happening in today’s Gospel reading: the Pharisee was so caught up in the cleansing ritual that he lost the point of it. Washing one’s hands before eating was a religious obligation, imposed upon people in the name of purity, and ordered by God’s law. And yet even though Jesus accepts the Pharisee’s invitation to dine with him, Jesus doesn’t observe this religious norm.

It must have seemed very odd—and, in fact, a breach of respect. The Pharisee probably thought he was being respectful of Jesus by inviting him in, and Jesus immediately violates the common practice as well as the law to which the Pharisee has dedicated his life.

Jesus’ response is anything but reassuring. “Oh, you Pharisees! Although you cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, inside you are filled with plunder and evil. You fools! Did not the maker of the outside also make the inside? But as to what is within, give alms, and behold, everything will be clean for you.”

Observing laws and rituals literally allows us to lose sight of the meaning behind them. Jesus didn’t say it was bad to observe the cleansing ritual; what he said was that the cleansing had to be deeper, had to penetrate words and thoughts and actions. The Pharisee only looked at the letter of the law—so he wasn’t able to perceive the spirit of the law, the point of having the law in the first place.

As far back as Leviticus, we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves. The meaning is reasonably clear, yet Luke tells us that out of that law arose a discussion to determine precisely who our neighbors are—and, perhaps more importantly, to establish who isn’t included as a neighbor. Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, “The letter kills, the spirit gives life” (2 Co 3, 6). In the Sermon on the Mountain, Jesus criticizes those who observe the letter of the law but transgress the spirit (Mt 5, 20).

Washing the outside of the cup while leaving the inside dirty isn’t what we’re called to do. It’s not enough to follow the letter of the law; it’s in observing and internalizing and honoring the spirit of the law that we become pure, that we become new people in Christ. Which means that it has to be about love of other people: it’s in the practice of love that the fullness of the law is attained. “Give alms,” says Jesus, “and behold, everything will be clean for you.”

Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.

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For most people, forgiveness has conditions. I’ll forgive if someone apologizes to me, or if they do something to somehow “make it up” to me. I’ll forgive if they take the first step.

I always find that curious. When you were wronged by the person you’re refusing to forgive, that person had control over you. By waiting for them to make the first move and apologize, you’re allowing them to continue to have control over you. Is that truly what you had in mind? Does that really make any sense?

In 1979, 19-year-old Anne Marie Hagan’s father was murdered. Hagan was consumed with anger, bitterness, vengeance, and self-pity. Almost twenty years later, she was able to meet with the killer, and she forgave him. Her forgiveness wasn’t based on the offender asking for it. “Forgiveness cannot be conditional on remorse,” she says, “because that would mean we can only forgive those who are sorry.”

In 2006, a man walked into an Amish school and shot 10 girls between the ages of nine and 13. The shooter, Charles Roberts, then committed suicide. In the midst of their grief over this shocking loss, the Amish community didn’t cast blame. Instead, they reached out with grace and compassion toward the killer’s family. That same day, Amish neighbors visited the Roberts family to comfort them in their sorrow and pain. Amish mourners outnumbered the non-Amish at the Roberts’ funeral.

These are two very different and very striking examples of forgiveness. As long as Anne Marie Hagan held onto her bitterness, she couldn’t live her life fully; it wasn’t until she forgave that she felt free. And the Amish didn’t wait: their automatic reaction was to forgive.

Today’s Gospel reading is at the root of these and many other acts of forgiveness. As Christians, we are called to forgive, not because anyone who has wronged us asks us for it, but because God asks it of us.

Peter, ever the questioning one, always trying to get it right, asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus must have looked at him with compassion–but, perhaps, also with some amusement. Peter was thinking in such small terms! “I say to you,” Jesus replies, “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Seventy-seven times! Peter must have been gobsmacked. He probably thought that forgiving someone seven times would make him a pretty fine fellow–but that wasn’t even close. Seventy-seven times might as well be infinite; and that is, of course, the point. God forgives us, over and over and over again. And it’s our responsibility, our calling, to pass that along, as Jesus underlines in the story of the servant forgiven his debt who won’t forgive someone else their debt. How can we stand in the light of God’s unending forgiveness–and not forgive others?

The bonus is that, occasionally, forgiveness isn’t as difficult a task as we make it out to be. In Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer C.S. Lewis writes,

Last week while at prayer, I suddenly discovered—or felt as if I did—that I had really forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying, and praying that I might. When the things actually happened (sudden as the longed-for cessation of one’s neighbor’s radio), my feeling was, “But it’s so easy. Why didn’t you do it ages ago?”

Sometimes God grants us the grace to forgive easily. More often, it takes effort, and discipline, and faith on our part to get over whatever insult or injury someone has done to us. But in this as in many others lessons, Jesus is wise. Carrying the burden of a grudge, of hatred, of anger isn’t hurting the other person–it’s hurting us. It’s keeping us away from the perfect freedom of life in Christ. It’s erecting a wall between us and God’s grace.

For the Amish of Pennsylvania, forgiveness was as natural as breathing. Forgiveness didn’t negate their pain or grief or loss, but it elevated it, instead, into an offering to God.

We who are forgiven must forgive. It is that simple, and that difficult, and that necessary.

Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.

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Sometimes that’s hard to believe.

It’s easy to look out over the landscape of what humanity has done to the world and believe that this isn’t what God had in mind for us. We’re constantly at war with each other; we poison the water that feeds us and the air that sustains us; we neglect those who don’t have the political or financial power to “count” in our culture or in our world.

Yet in today’s gospel, Jesus says, “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

The early Church took that literally; first-century Christians fervently believed that Jesus would return at any moment, that the world would soon end, and that the Kingdom was quite exactly and physically at hand. For some of them, this assumption made it easier to follow Jesus’ teachings: sell what you own, give it all to the poor, turn the other cheek, feed the hungry… in the shadow of the end of time, this may have seemed more workable than it does to many people living two centuries later who have to pay rent and put food on the table for the next few decades at least.

The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand… we just have to live in the uncertainty of not knowing exactly when. And no one likes uncertainty!

All of which makes today’s gospel extremely challenging, because it seems to ask us to put away that uncertainty and behave as if the Kingdom is already here: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons. Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give. Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts; no sack for the journey, or a second tunic, or sandals, or walking stick.” That feels like even more uncertainty. It’s unclear how we’re to go about carrying out these difficult tasks; we’re being asked not to think about ourselves, our own security, our own comforts, but rather move forward into an unclear future without any of the material goods that make us feel safe. How are we supposed to resolve that command with living lives in the 21^st century?

Perhaps the resolution is not in establishing certainty—something we all aspire to and never will attain in this lifetime—but in remembering that we aren’t simply challenged: we are also loved. Today’s reading from Hosea underscores that: even though God’s children didn’t recognize his love, even though they turned away and embraced the worship of other deities, God’s love remained steadfast: “When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the farther they went from me,” Hosea says. “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks (…) I will not destroy Ephraim again; For I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you; I will not let the flames consume you.”

I will not let the flames consume you. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The promise is there: we are beloved of our God. We shouldn’t behave as if that were not true. We should be living differently from those around us. We should be bravely taking on the gospel’s challenges, knowing that God is behind it all. We don’t have to be afraid: God won’t let us fall. It may not always feel like it—but the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.

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Stress.

There cannot be one person reading this who hasn’t experienced it as a major factor in their lives. We’re all stressed, it seems, from the moment we get up in the mornings until we lie down for a troubled sleep at night. Appointments, deadlines, worries, fears all contribute to our levels of stress (and even more so when they’re missed appointments or forgotten deadlines!), and our diets and lack of exercise don’t help. Let’s face it, we’re a stressed-out nation.

That’s proven a goldmine for a plethora of professions and manufacturers who cater to the stressed. The same smartphones that keep us ridiculously connected also offer meditation and mindfulness apps. There are vitamins and supplements that claim to lower anxiety, exercises and yoga and gym memberships to counteract its effects, and promises that the next self-help bestseller will absolutely be the magic bullet to help us find wellness and calm.

As Catholics, we have a slightly different take on the whole question of stress. Oh, of course, we too should be eating more leafy greens and less sugar; we need to go for brisk walks and drag ourselves away from our computer screens like everybody else. But we’re blessed by the fact that Jesus knew all about stress, and gave us the one prescription for it that actually works.

It’s ridiculously simple, which may be why many of us find it hard to put into practice. But today’s reading from the Gospel of St. Matthew could not be clearer; we are called to be different. Followers of Jesus think and behave differently from the pagans. In particular this message can be boiled down to a few points:

• You can’t love God and money both. Choose.
• Worrying means that you’re taking life into your own hands instead of giving it to God.
• God absolutely loves you. All the time, every day.
• Don’t think about what is unimportant, but focus on heaven. Anything else is secondary.

The things that stress us out the most are generally the least important. What does that deadline have to do with your salvation? Will you get to heaven any faster by worrying about buying that new car?

We live in our culture and it makes some demands on us that we must meet. We have to have a place to sleep. We need to have food to eat. We’d like to have a good education, a decent job, a fun vacation. And these aren’t frivolous or unworthy goals; the problem is that we allow them to become our only goals.

We should have one goal: to be united with God. Everything else is secondary. Love God with all your heart; have faith that he will provide for you; don’t confuse essentials with nonessentials. You cannot serve God and money at the same time. If you spend your time worrying about accumulating money—and all the things that go along with it—then, Jesus tells us, your faith is small. You can do better.

Take a deep breath, trust in God, and… let go. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll de-stress!

Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.

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If you’re anything like me, you talk to God a lot, and most of that conversation has to do with something you want. I’ve always taken the adage to ask God for help to heart, often to the point of neglecting the rest—giving thanks, asking forgiveness, praying for others. “Keep me safe,” I say every time I enter my car; whether or not I remember to say thank you when I get out is another thing altogether!

Today’s Gospel reading gives us the promise: “Whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you (…) ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.”

Perhaps we take Jesus’ words a little too literally. We ask for a lot of things in Jesus’ name. Safe passage. Good health. World peace. A marriage proposal. Willy-nilly we bring God heaps of requests of what we want. Prayer becomes another to-do list: I want this and that and the other… And somehow God still loves us through our childish self-centered way of reading scripture and applying it to our lives. Jesus said to ask, so we ask. And that’s what we call prayer.

Don’t get me wrong: I think that praying for things is important. In fact, I believe that what the Church needs now, more than anything else, is prayer.

The problem comes when we start defining prayer according to our narrow perceptions and understanding. Praying is what we do, what we say, what we think. It can be scheduled, discussed, planned. And yet our tradition is rich with the shining thread of centuries of understanding prayer as more than simply words. The Catholic Church has, in fact, always maintained a good balance between spirit and form, between how one does things and the reason one does them. Form without spirit is mindless repetition. Spirit without form is undisciplined and self-focused.

That balance is a life of prayer.

What happens, of course, is we say, “I need to spend more time praying.” Or we might lament, “I ought to pray more often.” We don’t need to pray more often. We don’t need to pray for longer periods of time. What we need is a life of prayer, something that allows for that balance between form and spirit, something that is permeated, shot through, with God’s grace and love. Prayer needs to be a life, not an activity.

What does a life of prayer look like? Father Walter Burghardt, SJ, told the story of an old farmer who would stop at a chapel on his way home from the fields. Knowing that the man just sat in the chapel apparently doing nothing, a neighbor asked him, “What goes on when you sit there?” The old man smiled and said, “I look at the good God, and the good God looks at me.”

That experience is consistent with living a life of prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church informs us that prayer is “the encounter of God’s thirst with ours,” and that’s where all prayer comes from, that encounter, that completion we feel when we are in our Father’s presence. “We must remember God,” said St. Gregory of Nazianzus, “more often than we draw breath.”

So perhaps I’m not wrong in stepping into my car and asking God to keep me safe. I don’t think about doing it; it’s as automatic as is fastening my seatbelt. My life is permeated with God’s presence and love, so my everyday actions are infused with an awareness of God as well. Spirit, that intangible presence, is the backdrop to every other act of prayer.

It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t experience prayerful moments, participate in the liturgy, or rediscover the Rosary. Form is the other part of our Church’s balanced life. “Ask,” says Jesus, “so that your joy will be complete.” Asking puts us directly in the presence of God, and that presence is what gives us an unsurpassable joy.

Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.