Carla Mae's Blog

  Not only do we need to know when to be ‘wise as a serpent and simple as a dove,’ when we are present in these times of ours, we need to decide whether to be present at all. When we are with those who are so different, so opposite ourselves in belief, in race, in culture, in opinion, we can arrange to be emotionally absent. It’s just safer. I remain aloof. Uninvolved. So my challenge can be to be present at all. To go as Francis urges, to the periphery, to the frontiers, may just mean to step outside my psychological comfort zone. What might this look like? When I began to talk with Muslims about twenty-five years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I rather ‘felt’ my way. We were to meet at Aquinas Institute, so I suggested we discuss the Qur’an, admitting we Catholics knew nothing about it. This seemed to even out the playing field a bit, because the Imam, Dr. Waheed Rana, was coming to unfamiliar ground in a Christian building, and so we Christians would...

    "What can it tell me, right? It’s a scandal. I don’t even want to think of it. I don’t like to dwell on all Jesus’ sufferings. I feel so helpless to do anything…” If this is you, then you have a lot of company. What good can the cross possibly be? Yet here it is, the Feast of the Holy Cross, right in the middle of Ordinary Time. It’s as if the Church doesn’t want us to lose sight of it, even when we’re in the green “growing time.” Why – so far from Lent, does this feast appear?   The Christian community fully accepts the Jewish scriptures as its own. The God of those texts can be pretty tough. They present an image of God that rightfully demands respect and reverence, faithfulness and obedience, and no one wants to dismiss these responses as unimportant. But then we have the New Testament, and suddenly much more emerges. No longer is God speaking through a prophetic writer who puts the word down on dead animal skins. No. Now the Word is speaking in li...

It is hard to watch the news these days…so much violence, so much corruption and deceit, so many crude remarks about women, about immigrants, about Muslims. In the face of all this we have our fresh focus statement. We are to be present. But how are we to be present in these times ? The temptation might be to despair at the darkness of it all. Or maybe it would give us some satisfaction if we just allowed ourselves to get enraged and join those who yell the loudest. The “Domination System,” as Walter Wink put it some time back, is having a heyday. Yet the transformative Word and the contemplative presence challenging us points in another direction. It’s not that we are to be either serpents or doves. No, it’s not an either/or. It’s a both/and. We are to be both. But that’s where the directive ends. Jesus doesn’t say how, when, or where. Wisely, he knows that times change. More, he is confident we will know how to deal with these times. How can he be so sure? Has he left u...

The August heat is upon us. The liturgy in the midst of Ordinary Time points to a brilliance from a source other than the sun. We are shown the brilliance of the Son . The feast of the Transfiguration shows us a Jesus we can barely look at. We are being shown our own humanity in the state of its own transformation. We can hardly believe it. Like a tender mother, the Word shows the three disciples this amazing sight to prepare them for the degraded view of the human Jesus that they are going to witness during the passion. They are being prepared so that hopefully this imprint on their experience will help them get through it. Then on the 15 th of August, we will be shown “…the woman clothed with the sun…” to make sure we get the point. We celebrate the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of God. What is the point? It’s really quite amazing. In this time and with the world situation what it is, we are told that all the struggle, all the greed, all the violence, all the corruption w...

Some of us still chafe at the word “soul” in this newer liturgical text at the time of communion. We prefer “…that I may be healed.” In our present day understanding, “I” just seems to include “all of me.” The real problem is that we really don’t know what the soul is. Maybe it’s that old “ghost in a machine.” We just can’t get a hold on it. We are now entering deeper into ordinary time. The readings are filled with growth images and the healing of a broken humanness. But how do you heal a broken soul ? How do I even know when it’s broken? Ordinary time is that day to day string of plain old moments and events, right? But stop a moment…such ordinariness is just where the Easter Mystery is going on, and much of it is taking place in our soul. So what are we talking about? The soul is the life force that keeps our digestion and circulation going. It is that mysterious energy that we feel when we take our pulse. The soul not only keeps our physical functions going, it has ma...