Cost of discipleship-Reflection on this Sunday's Gospel

There is a special date in my life that changed my trajectory. It was January 13th.  On that day Jesus and I intersected.  Well, Jesus had been after me for many years, but it was that day in 1996 that I heard him say my name and ask me an important question.  "Will you follow me?" On that day I responded.

This Sunday's  story we hear from St. Luke (9:51-62) the story of Jesus who was headed to Jerusalem.  He was with his disciples and he rebukes them for wanting to punish a town that does not welcome them.  Jesus once again shows us that he is more interested in evangelizing through his actions of peace.  Jesus invites us to follow him, he doesn't intimidate us nor does he humiliate us into following him.  And this is how Jesus came to me too.  He came gently into my heart and said to me "I love you".

On that day I was determined I would be a follower of Jesus'.  I had a lot to learn, despite having grown up Catholic I was like a baby in my faith; I was eager.  I wanted to know him more.
Standing in front of a tabernacle in a very humble church environment far from home, after having received communion,  I fell in love with my Lord. I heard him clearly and I responded in faith: "Yes Lord, I will follow you."  But I was afraid.  I heard him say, "trust me, have no fear".  So I stepped out of my old life and way of being that day and never looked back.

I desired to be obedient to his teachings, I was eager to follow his ways. I began to devour the Bible and I would pray...."Lord, you want me to go to Africa? Ok! I will go."  Or, "Lord, you want me to volunteer at a homeless shelter? Yes, I will do it!"  But instead I heard him say to me in the silence of my heart to be at peace. He began to teach me to pray and care for my family. I learned to be patient with myself.  It was going to take some time for him to teach me new behaviors, new attitudes, new ways of loving. He was challenging me to stretch myself. I began to forgive old debts. I began to heal old wounds. I learned to love Mary, his mother as my own mom.  She became a model for me on what it means to be a disciple, as woman and a mother.

Jesus calls each of us to be his disciple every day. He asks us to take up our cross. There is a definite cost to discipleship. For each one of us it is different.  We hear this in the gospel when each individual tells Jesus one reason or another why they must take care of something first.  Jesus says to focus first on following him.  He clearly wants us to understand that there will be discomfort in our experiences as a disciple.  Remember, he asks us to travel down a narrow road!  We'll find many who question our sanity or our intellect.  He asks us to step outside of our comfort zones.  He asks us to have courage! 

In those days my gaze had been on a very promising career.  I worked very hard and I was earning a good income; acquiring prestige in my professional circle. I was passionate about my work, it seemed it consumed my life. I had no time for anything else.  I loved my children and husband very much.  My husband and I struggled to make time for one another. Having encountered Jesus, I realized it was time to make some decisions I had avoided because my pride would get in the way. I left my full time position and reset my gaze on Jesus. I trusted that the  gifts that the Father had given me  which I had been able to use in my profession would now be used first for the Glory of God instead of for my own glory. 

I don't regret this decision.  It has taken me down a road of an unknown future and of many surprises, yet I have never felt alone nor weak.  When I think of my future, I am looking beyond retirement, I am looking at where I want to be spiritually once my body is cast off.  I know that my life has a super natural purpose, Jesus is not  going to lead me astray.  

Looking back on my life, the cost of discipleship for me has been devastating if seen from a secular point of view.  But from a spiritual perspective I have gained so much more than I could ever have imagined.  I feel peaceful.  I feel fulfilled.  I feel alive.  I have refocused my life around prayer and feeding myself and my family spiritually.  Each day Jesus asks me to give something up, and I have been given the grace to say yes. The Christian path is a life of denial. As Paul says, it is no longer I that lives but Christ lives in me.  (Gal 2: 20)  I am still being taught by him, often I fail.  Yet, these words which I heard I still treasure are not far from my mind, "trust in me...pray often....have no fear".  I believe that through prayer this has been an  answer which led me straight to my savior, who had been waiting for me in the Eucharist all this time.  There he lovingly invited me to follow him.

Is there a cost to following him? You bet!  If you let go of  fears, say yes, you too will say that he is worth it all!

Who do you say I am? Lk 9:18-24

In this Sunday's Gospel we hear Jesus ask his disciples "who do YOU think I am?" St. Peter, who later during our Lord's suffering denied knowing him three times, said quite clearly "The Christ of God".  Jesus is said to have rebuked him. It seems that Peter and the disciples did not really understand what Jesus was asking.  Peter thought he had the right answer.  After all he had been hanging around Jesus for some time, surely he thought he knew him. He had seen him heal illnesses, feed multitudes, forgive sinners, they prayed together, ate meals together, traveled together.  He thought he knew Jesus.

To know someone means that one has a relationship with that person.  It seems that this Gospel we are being asked to not be so quick to think we know who Jesus is.

In our society we see many groups or individuals who will be very quick to identify with the Democratic Jesus or the Republican Jesus or the Touchdown Jesus or the Psychologist Jesus or the Warrior Jesus or the Meek Jesus or the Friend Jesus or the Environmental Jesus.....so many ways to frame our concept of Jesus upon whom we'll  profess our faith upon.

What Jesus teaches us is that he is always more than what we think he is. He is more loving, more forgiving, more terrifying, more awesome, more Son of God than we can ever imagine.  And what I like best about this Gospel is that Jesus doesn't define for us in this moment what the "right" answer should have been, instead he keeps us in a spirit of discernment. 

Later, he shows us who he really is with the greatest miracle ever....a moment when eternity breaks into our sphere.  Through his death and resurrection Jesus leaves those who truly want to know him the answer to this question: he is the Son of a Living God.  He shows us that he takes upon himself the sins of the entire world, so that all of us may be assured of eternity with our Father. This Jesus is Love in the truest sense of the word. Love that wants a relationship with us.  Love that is a person.  Love that wants us to be like Love too.

 

 

When we come to know Jesus we must choose to love him or not. There really is no in between.  This is why at Mass, each Sunday we approach the altar and say "yes" to Jesus by participating in his miracle of death and resurrection. This event happened once in history however it is an eternal sacrifice. (Hebrews 7:26-27 and Heb 9:11 among others).We become active with God in the greatest miracle of all.  (Lk 22:19)  When we celebrate and "remember" this miracle we are saying 'yes' to becoming a part of our miracle story. We are saying 'I want to know you more'.  We eat his body and drink his blood in remembrance of this truth, of this promise. (1 Corin. 11:24)  It becomes our mystical encounter with the person; the Living Son of God who challenges us by asking us each time: "who do you say I am?"

If we believe this to be true when we approach the altar we don't see just an ordinary table anymore. This table where our community gathers has transformed into a sacred place where Jesus becomes real in our presence.  Knowing Jesus makes me humble, makes me hopeful, makes me remorseful,  makes me want to be like him and sacrifice myself for the good of others.  When we come to know this Jesus we are faced with a dilemma-do I allow myself to be transformed into Love?  If I choose to be transformed I must die to my old self.  This is where the rub exists.  This is where I fail as a disciple, because if I am honest, I want to have the Jesus that fits my "box". I prefer to be in my comfort zone. 

Getting to know Jesus is a process.  He challenges me to get to know him better.  I must not be quick to say "I have him figured out".  I must walk the via dolorosa with him. I must be prayerful like him. I must be a peacemaker like him.  I must be open to examine my conscience each day,  willing to admit my sinfulness and my need for Him in my life.  I must be more like him and less like my Self(who wants the easy way, the proud way, all the power, all the glory for myself).

So the question we reflect on this week is....who do I say Jesus is?  Let us ponder.

 

Tribute to an Art Teacher

Tribute to an Art teacher

There are some teachers who leave an impression that one may not notice until one is mature enough to know the difference.  Mr.  Anthony Cardoso was such a teacher for me. 

What made Mr. Cardoso unique was the love that he demonstrated for art. Without a lot of fanfare or boasting,  he made it obvious that he was in love with the topic that he was about to demonstrate to his class.  His hands would move pastels, or water colors around on paper or arrange wood blocks in ways that seemed to be magical.  Art could be linear and be spun with yarn and wrapped around nails or could be fluid and translucent through the use of paint on glass surfaces. Clay became a material that contained an essence of something that needed to be born. The ordinary became extraordinary in our classroom experiences with him. He taught us to see our world joyfully with new eyes.

In his classes throughout high school,  he taught me important lessons that would serve me well later in my own experience as a designer and design educator. 

He taught me to self criticize my work but to also appreciate the process that led me to the work as well. It was easy to love his class because it was the one period in my day where I could experiment and dream.  He made it a safe zone for making mistakes and moving on.  It was a place where the process had value as much as the end result.  In his room, it was ok to be messy and playful. In fact, the messier and the more mistakes I made the better the outcome may be. 

He taught me to have a discerning eye for design, to look for order, pattern and shape; to see wholeness and to appreciate details. Both bigness and smallness have their place in good art.

He opened my awareness to beauty that can be expressed through materials, through combinations of materials, through ordinary elements. He showed me how to trust my instincts.

He  taught me to see that being creative involved as much serious work as  did serendipity and fun.  Creativity involved using both sides of the brain: the logical and the irrational.  Together mystical things can happen and I had the power to make it happen. He taught me to love art, to live art, and to imagine myself as a person who enabled beauty to exist in the world.

He moved through the class smiling and stopping at our table. He had a way of being gentle yet in prodding ways he would help us examine our work. He gave us confidence in our ability to recognize when to stop and what needed more work.

The highlight for me was painting murals throughout the Tampa Bay community. His serene presence in the background, we became his apprentices in the realm of public art.  He helped us understand the power that art has as a communication tool.  Without the use of text, well composed images can captivate and can send messages in significant ways.

As his art students we learned to be co creators with him in our community.  He would allow us some artistic control over pieces that would mark our existence in our neighborhoods.  It affirmed that as artists we could leave something valuable for others.  

In my 20 years teaching, he came to mind often.  Little did I know then as a high school student how important to me his teaching style would be. He  demonstrated how to teach from the heart as well as the mind. The most important thing a teacher can give to a student is to be so in love with their subject that it shows in everything they bring to their lessons.  That is what Mr. Cardoso did.  He taught many of us to love art, to be inspired by art, and to want to share that love with others.

Years later, talk about serendipity; his grandson Justin and my daughter Cristina would meet, begin dating and fall in love. I had not seen Mr. Cardoso since my high school years. One of the first family gatherings we had in our home before the kids married, I shared with him how important our classroom experiences had been to me.  I pulled out an old faded picture of one the art pieces that we had the painted as a class. It had been a huge mural on the outside of the Humane Society building. We shared some laughs; he vaguely remembered this event even though in my mind it had been a monumental moment in my career as an "artist". I will always recall that Saturday spring morning when we art students and mentor gathered and began to lay out the work on the huge vertical plane.  It seemed so overwhelming. Yet his calm and confident presence guided us throughout the day. He helped us mix colors, he fine tuned our work. For many years afterwards, I would drive by that building and smile at that "masterpiece" courtesy of bunch of high school kids and one amazing and dedicated teacher who believed in our ability to make art appear on the outside of a very plain old surface.  Retelling him that story, it did not surprise me that he shrugged off the appreciation and  compliments that I tried to give him for giving us such incredible learning experiences.

Mr. Cardoso has left an big impression in the lives of many students who were privileged to have had him. He also has left a wonderful legacy in Tampa with his murals and sculptures that adorn galleries and parks, each one capturing  the beautiful essence of being alive and being human. He touched my heart as an artist and because of him it has made a big difference in my life and in my family.

 

Reflection on God's Word: LUKE 7:36-8:3

This Sunday’s gospel is one of my favorite Bible stories; it is the story of the sinful woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with precious oil. The righteous are indignant and wonder why would she waste her valuable perfume, instead of selling it and giving money to the needy?

The men who had invited Jesus to eat with them failed to see themselves in this woman who approached Jesus with humility. They did not possess humility; they were quick to judge this woman’s behavior. 

Jesus taught them that this woman’s repentant act was an act of faith, a divine dialogue with God and we must be slow to judge others.  This woman was moved to pour out her most valuable possession upon her encounter with God.  This is how we please God, when we give the very best of ourselves to Him, to glorify Him!

Isn’t this what the world needs today more than ever; Less judgment and more humility? The climate we live in is one of self-hatred, competition and division. The world tells us that our worth lies in physical perfection or in what we do for a living, or what we drive, or where we live, or the people we hang out with, yet God calls us to see ourselves for who we really are: a spiritual being made for union with Him.  When we learn to see each other neither with cynism nor fear, rather with love and forgiveness, we are more in union with God. When we learn to see ourselves as worthy of God’s love because he created us for himself regardless of our circumstances, we become closer to knowing God.

In this scripture reading I am reminded to turn to prayer first. In prayer I am more able to see through the lens of charity. God sees us as worthy of his forgiveness, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. God wants me to run to him and offer him myself in humility.  God knows who I am.  I am unclean. Yet when I go to him in faith, He restores me. This woman understood the beauty of God’s grace; she understood the gift of God’s forgiveness. She went to seek Christ out, knowing that a personal encounter would heal her. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is this gift that Jesus left to his Church, that allows me to go  and through Grace I can know that God has healed me just like this woman was.  When I go to Confession I go with humility and with joy, knowing that God loved me before I was even born.  When I go before him his eyes upon me are not of anger but of love and compassion.

Humility means compassion. It means being able to see myself and  others through the eyes of true love. This story reminds me that humility and being able to forgive others like God forgives me is what makes us all beautiful and holy in the eyes of God.

At His Side-an Ode to my Growing Boy

My growing boy;  tender moments such as

when he rests his head on my shoulder and

his smiling brown eyes  speaks directly to my soul.

 I relish  these moments when he is at my side.

Bedtime rituals; smoothing the waves of  covers

turns into an invitation to  speak our mind

his always open to senseless giggles and tickles

how I relish these moments of  being by his side.

Surprising me constantly as he steps boldly into wisdom

I notice that he is absorbing the world's lessons

Generously he wants to respond in love

How I wish to always  keep him at my side.

Deftly afternoons transform to evening shadows

He will transform into a young man soon

and  be called to taste sweetness found in yonder gardens

lured by scented roses who hide their ache  on their side.

For now I take comfort in our own secret garden

where his yearning for new horizons are just dreams we share

I pray that the innocent love that now shines from within him

will be God's warm love that he will always have at his side.

 

CCayon

June 9, 2013