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» In Light of Faith
 
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C, July 22, 2007
by Richard Linneberger
As I write this, I am in Rome. Walking and sweating have almost become second nature although it has not become totally comfortable. A simple drink of water has become a delight I have rarely experienced.
Two days ago I arrived at the center where I will be taking a seminar. The first thing I was offered was water! Hospitality had a new meaning.
Today’s first reading has Abraham and Sarah extending hospitality to complete strangers with both food and water. In the Gospel Martha welcomes Jesus into her home. Hospitality becomes a scriptural value.
For many years I have often asked both new parishioners and individuals wishing to become a Catholic a very simple question: “What attracted you to this parish?” Over and over again the response has been “people are so friendly – they made me feel welcome.”
The scriptural value of hospitality had become a reality.
Quite honestly I have often been amazed at this response. I have been associated primarily with very large parishes where it is so easy to be “lost in the crowd.”
Who would notice if someone is present or not? Much less, who is making someone feel welcome?
Fortunately I currently am in a parish where our greeters offer warmth and hospitality to the stranger as well as to fellow parishioners. However, the scriptural value of hospitality cannot end with the greeters.
If we truly believe we are God’s family, then each and every one of us has to welcome our family members. When we gather at the family table at church (in other words at the altar), being welcomed and welcoming are foundational and basic to coming to the table.
Who would ignore a family member at one’s home table? Again, we are God’s family, the family of God. How can we ignore a family member at our Table of the Lord?
And now a challenge to each of us for the next liturgy at which you and I are present: Warmly greet someone you don’t know – a total stranger to you! Maybe like Abraham and Sarah, the total stranger is someone God has sent to you or to your faith community, your faith family.
Maybe like Martha, you will be welcoming an enfleshed Jesus into your presence.
Welcome the stranger in your midst!
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Parents have main role in building character
by Mary Hood Hart
When my children were young, our public schools began character education.
I was skeptical, even then, about its effectiveness. I would drive by the elementary school and see the character “word of the month” posted on the school sign — honesty, for example — and wonder how such a concept could possibly be conveyed to a child through education.
And while the motive for character education is certainly admirable, the results are questionable. Indeed, this generation of college students, the cream of the crop when it comes to the products of our schools, apparently have little compunction about cheating. Many admit to cheating regularly. Surely, if character education were working, the results would be most noticeable when it comes to honesty in academics.
In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks suggests that character education fails because schools cannot “teach” morality.
He says advocates of character education have miscalculated when it comes to human nature. One doesn’t “decide” logically to behave a certain way.
For example, a person doesn’t make a decision to engage in risky or immoral behavior. If human beings were deciders, then character education makes sense. We would then choose not to do something based on the information we’ve attained. Like computers, we would store the information in our memories and make the choice with the most logical outcome. (I will not eat this doughnut because its fat content exceeds healthy limits.)
Instead, Brooks argues, human beings are perceivers. We make our decisions based on the environment we have been raised in and currently find ourselves.
For example, even knowing all the risks, a person may opt to take drugs because he or she prefers an altered consciousness rather than coping with the pain of life.
Or, a person may choose to become involved in an unhealthy relationship because he or she is desperate for emotional attachment.
Purely offering information about destructive choices fails to persuade people from engaging in behavior. (I will eat this doughnut, even though I know it is bad for my health, because the temporary pleasure it brings me exceeds my concerns.)
Even if character education isn’t effective, what’s wrong with offering it anyway? Isn’t it better than nothing?
The problem with relying on the schools to teach character is that many parents then abdicate their crucial role in forming their own kids’ character and in engaging in important dialogue with their kids.
They then come to expect institutions to form their children’s character. Indeed, it is much easier to rely on an institution to educate our children than to accept the responsibility ourselves, especially when the institution is composed of “experts.”
Recent generations of parents are now accustomed to relying on “experts” to guide them in rearing their children. Over time, parents’ confidence becomes eroded. It’s also uncomfortable and time-consuming to talk to our children about moral issues, especially when our own behavior fails to live up to the standards espoused. Some parents feel hypocritical if they talk against pre-marital sex or marijuana use, when they indulged in their own youth. So, rather than risk dialogue with their children, they avoid the subject altogether.
In much the same way they rely on schools, parents rely on the institution of the church to teach their children morality without considering the tremendous influence the home environment plays in a child’s character.
As a religious educator, I’ve encountered many families who come to the parish only when their children start to act out, expecting somehow that an injection of religion will rescue their child from a wayward path.
What they fail to realize is that they, the parents, must invest the time and energy in forming a Christian environment in their home, ideally from the beginning of a child’s life, supplemented, of course, through the support of the parish community.
Another advantage to parents of relying on institutions to raise a child is the option of then blaming the institutions when the child begins to stray. Rather than honestly looking at their own lives and their own example (far more influential than moral instruction) parents blame the “systems” that failed their children.
And the child, too, learns to avoid accepting responsibility.
The hard truth is this: parents and the home environment play a crucial role in a child’s character. Parents who offer a stable, loving home, and who model good character, are far more likely to instill those moral values in their children.
What the children learn at school and church is no substitute.
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Holiness is caring
by Barbara Hughes
“It’s not just about a plant closing. It’s about not seeing the people that we’ve seen every day for most of our lives.”
This comment was made by a worker at the Ford Assembly Plant in Norfolk when it closed its doors for good. A similar thought was echoed by a woman on the other side of the country under an entirely different set of circumstances.
After wildfires around Lake Tahoe spread through her neighborhood, burning all the homes along an entire street, she lamented, “It’s not just about the homes that were burned, but the people that we lived side by side with for 20, 30 or 40 years. I wish I knew where they were so that I could at least talk to them.”
Both situations, though totally unrelated, involved loss and uncertainty. Yet the manner in which these two individuals prioritized elements of their grief speaks to the importance of relationships.
While jobs and materials can be replaced, the absence of the people who contributed to what was once regarded as normal life is another matter. Those losses created feelings of sorrow that went beyond the loss of a job or a house.
I have no knowledge of the religious affiliation, if any, of the man and woman who made the comments, but the grounding of their priorities in relationships reflects the basic social dimension of our beings.
It overshadows the self-centeredness directives characteristic of today’s culture. Their comments reflect the primary model for all relationships, the Holy Trinity. Love cannot exist in isolation. One God with three distinct natures speaks to the complexity of creation that is rooted in Divine Mystery.
As members of the same human family, created in the image of that Mystery, we are all deeply connected. When that connection is severed, even on a temporal basis, we feel incomplete and instinctively mourn the loss. We grieve for one another because when one member of the body hurts, we all hurt.
If you doubt this, think about the last time you witnessed a tragedy. Whether it unfolded in your own life, you watched it on television, read about it in the newspaper or heard about it from a friend, rather than breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t you, your heart went out to those stricken. That’s compassion!
Compassion means to be with others, even in their pain. It transcends the boundaries of flesh that encapsulate the physical body. Compassion bears witness to the reality that we are fed by the people who allow the love of God to shine forth.
Like the Trinity, human beings are interdependent, but unlike the Trinity, our knowledge that only love can make us whole is flawed. That knowledge evolves over time and often only when we are aware of the pain that results from a disconnect.
Often as we watch tragedies unfold we feel helpless. Some people seem to be given an inordinate amount of pain to bear, while others drift through life with seemingly little pain. When we draw comparisons, we are looking at life through human eyes, projecting our own limited tit-for-tat mentality onto the world we see.
We cannot know the heart and mind of God, but neither should we discount the presence of Mystery. As we learned from Job, suffering is not a curse.
A spark of divinity has been placed in each of us from the moment of our conception and that makes us holy. With the help of God’s grace, we have the ability to turn that spark of divinity into a raging inferno by bringing God’s love into the world.
We see this happening through the examples of good and concerned people everywhere. Often the world’s pain gives us an incentive to re-create a world which has grown indifferent or succumbed to the power of sin.
The other option is to allow the spark to grow cold through despair or indifference. We have choices every day and choice allows us to focus on ourselves or focus on the collective family of God, our family.
St. Augustine defined sin as the act of turning in upon oneself which tells us something about the choices we make.
Sins of omission are not as benign as some would like to think. Doing nothing sounds harmless but no action, or for that matter inaction, is without its consequences. When we realize that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing affects weather patterns in the United States, we have to look a bit more closely at the effects of our actions or lack of action when it comes to building the Kingdom of God.
Heart wrenching news comes into our homes via newsprint and satellite images on a daily basis. Suffering on the other side of the world impacts us because when one person suffers, we all suffer.
By the same token when one person is lifted into the heart of Mystery, we are all lifted. There is no excuse for idleness.
Faith calls us to live for one another and to pray for one another. And both echo the two greatest commandments: to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
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Copyright © 2006 The Catholic Virginian Press. Articles from Catholic News Services, including Fr. Dietzen’s column, may not be reproduced here due to copyright considerations.
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