Announcing:
Saint Mary's Press winner for the week of September 19, 2011!

Congratulations to Pat Byrd!

Pat will receive a copy of Breakthrough! The Bible for Young Catholics, a $20.95 value.

As the title suggests, Breakthrough! The Bible for Young Catholics highlights what happens throughout salvation history between God and humanity. God breaks through and connects with human history, thereby establishing a relationship with humanity.
Using the Good News translation, Breakthrough! The Bible for Young Catholics was created for young people leaving childhood and entering adolescence. Its ten special features were created to help make the Bible easier for young people to read and understand.

They will learn about the great people of the Bible, and will see how God has been breaking through in human history and connecting with humanity for thousands of years. Most important, they will discover, in the Bible, how God's messages to key people of faith have meaning for life today.

Breakthrough! The Bible for Young Catholics
ISBN: 978-0-88489-862-7, paper, 1,968 pages

Spiritual Wellness

One of the challenges of ministry can be taking the time to nourish and replenish your own faith life. So much of ministry with young people is giving of yourself and striving to care for their faith life. It is important, however, to take the time to care for your own faith. For this week’s Servant Leader, I would like to share with you an article from Pamela Johnson that looks at the insight we can gain from the Book of Genesis in terms of nourishing our personal faith life. Below is the introduction to the article. Following the introduction is a link to the full article. I pray you find the time for the continued nourishment of your faith, and as always, I pray that God will continue to bless you and your ministry.

Peace,
Steven McGlaun

Practicing Spiritual Wellness: Insights from Genesis
by Pamela Johnson

Everything depends on the person who stands in the front of the classroom. The teacher is not an automatic fountain from which intellectual beverages may be obtained. [He or she] is either a witness or a stranger. To guide a pupil into the promised land, [a teacher] must have been there.  .  .  .  When asking  .  .  .  : Do I stand for what I teach? Do I believe what I say? [he or she] must be able to answer in the affirmative.

What we need more than anything else is not textbooks but textpeople. It is the personality of the teacher which is the text that the pupils read; the text that they will never forget. (Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, edited by Samuel H. Dresner [New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002], pp. 62–63. Copyright © 2002, Crossroad Publishing, New York)

Rabbi Heschel has it right, I think. Nourishing and caring for our own spirits is our first task as teachers, as witnesses, as textpeople. The lives and spirits of the young people in our classrooms are deeply affected by the health of our own spiritual practice. As a former high school teacher and a person who has continued to teach both adults and young people across the years, I’ve found three words that help me stay grounded in God, nourished in spirit, and responsive to life. These three words are finish, rest, and bless. They are simple to state but more difficult to live. I share them with you, not as an expert who has it all figured out, but as someone who is still very young on the path to becoming a fully alive human being, a deeply rooted Catholic Christian, and a reflective practitioner.

Finish, Rest, Bless
How do we become textpeople? How do we stay grounded in God, nourished, and responsive? How do we live our lives as reflective practitioners, as healers, as artists? How do we live creative, whole, and holy lives?

When I first started thinking about these questions, a Scripture story came to mind. It was the Creation story found in Gen. 1:31—2:3.

God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good. Evening came, and morning followed—the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth and all their array were completed. Since on the seventh day God was finished with the work he had been doing, he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work he had done in creation. (NAB)

God finished, God rested, God blessed. Finish. Rest. Bless. This is God’s pattern in the creative act, and the more I think about it and practice it, the more I find that this is a model for my own creative life. As a teacher, a businesswoman, a mother, and a grandmother, there is always one more thing to do. I find that I am especially vulnerable to forgetting to practice God’s sacred pattern of finish, rest, bless  .  .  .  daily.

http://www.smp.org/Connect/April-2003.PDF

Click Here for More Information

Dealing with Times of Spiritual Dryness
From Letting Go of the Chaos: Ideas for Addressing Ministry-Related Stress

Our Story
Patiently persevere and do not let yourself get upset. Trust in God, who does not abandon those who seek him with a simple and righteous heart. He will not neglect to give you what you need for your path until he delivers you into that clear, pure light of love. You are meant to receive this great gift, yet it is only through the dark night of the spirit that he will bring you it.
(Saint John of the Cross)

Reflection
Spiritual dryness, according to Saint John of the Cross, is necessary for spiritual and soul growth. In his classic work Dark Night of the Soul (Image, 1959), Saint John writes a poem that on the surface may seem like a love poem. However, his explanation of it delivers comfort and challenge to any believer who experiences the dryness or dark night common among us. By going through the dark night, we of course eventually reach the light. When those of us in ministry go through dryness and darkness, the temptation to leave ministry may take hold. When we are authentic and vulnerable, others see us as we really are and can more readily identify with what we are teaching or sharing. Think about the young person who feels confident in his or her beliefs and then experiences tragedy. Our hope is that he or she turns to, not away from, Christ and the Church community during the trying times. As we experience our own difficult and stressful times, we too must turn to Christ and to one another. If young people see us as fully human, we may not be so inclined to think we have to be fully divine; instead, we can just be fully ourselves.

Questions to Ponder
- What spiritual dryness have I experienced myself, and how have I handled such times in the past?
- How do I embrace spiritual struggles and stresses in myself and in those I minister with and to?
- Whom are the spiritual masters I turn to in times of dryness?

For Consideration
- Read Saint John of the Cross’s poem and its explanation in Dark Night of the Soul.
- Be authentic and honest about your own questions and dryness.
- Be persistent in participating in the sacraments; in times of spiritual questioning and dryness, the ritual of the liturgy and the grace of the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation can be especially comforting.

Prayer
Provider God who gives all I need and cares for me more than I will ever know, walk even more closely with me through times of spiritual dryness. Rain down on me your life-giving drops of love, and let me be nourished like a desert after a storm. May times of dryness lead me even closer to you. Amen.

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 25, 2011
Matthew 21:28-32

Opening Prayer
Loving and merciful God, we thank you for second chances as we grow in our faith. Through the Holy Spirit, shower us with your grace and guide us to do your will here on earth. Give us the strength to persevere and the courage to come to you when we fail. With contrite hearts, we stand ready for the journey before us. Amen.

Context Connection
The parable of the two sons must be examined within the context of chapter 21. The chapter begins with Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The crowds proclaim that Jesus is the Son of David. Upon entering the city, Jesus goes to the Temple and cleanses it of those selling and buying within it. Referring to the Temple, which Jesus describes as "a house of prayer," he says, "You [the sellers and buyers] are making it a den of robbers" (21:13). The religious authorities, the chief priests and elders, demand to know on what authority Jesus has done this. In other words, they hadn't commissioned him or given him a license, and they wanted to see his credentials. Jesus does not respond to them directly but puts forth a few parables for their consideration.

In this Sunday's Gospel, one of those parables is before us. Jesus tells us of two sons and how they responded to their father's request. The father asks both sons to go and work in his vineyard. The first son says to his father, "'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went" (21:29). The second son responds in this way, "'I go, sir'; but he did not go" (21:30). Jesus poses this question to the chief priests and elders who had challenged his authority, "Which of the two did the will of his father?" (21:31). Without hesitation they answer, "The first" (21:31). Here Jesus places great emphasis on doing the will of the Father, which shaped his life and should shape ours. Matthew makes this same point earlier in the Gospel, in chapter 7, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven" (7:21).

Jesus affirms the answer given to him by the chief priests and elders and then goes on to speak of who will enter the Kingdom of heaven. Though these men are the officially designated religious authorities, others, such as repentant tax collectors and prostitutes, who actually carry out God's plan in their daily lives, will enter the Kingdom of heaven before the authorities. The chief priests and elders must have been astonished to hear Jesus make this point. Tax collectors and prostitutes, long considered to be immoral individuals, heard the call for repentance; they took the message proclaimed by John the Baptist and Jesus to heart. They dared to believe in the forgiveness of sins and, as a result, completely changed their way of life. The chief priests and elders heard the same message but refused to open their hearts and minds; sadly, the course of their lives remained unchanged. By comparing the chief priests and elders to tax collectors and prostitutes, Jesus exposes their deep hypocrisy, their willingness to condemn others while failing to examine and change their own behavior.

Whereas the chief priests and elders traveled the path taken by the second son, who said yes but did not do his own father's will, the social outcasts followed in the footsteps of the first son, who at first said no but went on to work in the vineyard just as his father requested. After telling this parable, Jesus surely did not gain any friends among these religious leaders.

Tradition Connection
Though Jesus did have conflicts with the religious elite who, according to the Gospel, turned him over to the Romans for crucifixion, some of them listened, taking to heart Jesus's teaching and preaching. Jesus challenged the religious leaders of his day to free themselves from the past, which included an attachment to hollow ritual, and open themselves up to the ongoing revelation of God in their lives. If a dynamic and ever-evolving relationship with God, who is love, shapes our lives, we will not be imprisoned by the past but will look for contemporary and relevant ways to share the love of God.

Many of Jesus' deeds and words constituted a "sign of contradiction,"1 but more so for the religious authorities in Jerusalem, whom the Gospel according to John often calls simply "the Jews,"2 than for the ordinary People of God.3 To be sure, Christ's relations with the Pharisees were not exclusively polemical. Some Pharisees warned him of the danger he was courting;4 Jesus praises some of them, like the scribe of Mark 12:34, and dines several times at their homes.5 Jesus endorses some of the teachings imparted by this religious elite of God's people: the resurrection of the dead,6 certain forms of piety (almsgiving, fasting, and prayer),7 the custom of addressing God as Father, and the centrality of the commandment to love God and neighbor.8 (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 575)
When people are able to allow God's love for humankind to be the compass for their life, then they become fully alive in Christ. Both Jeremiah and Paul write of God's law of love being able to create in us hearts of flesh capable of caring deeply for others rather than hearts of stone incapable of caring about anyone.

The perfect fulfillment of the Law could be the work of none but the divine legislator, born subject to the Law in the person of the Son.9 In Jesus, the Law no longer appears engraved on tables of stone but "upon the heart" of the Servant who becomes "a covenant to the people," because he will "faithfully bring forth justice."10 Jesus fulfills the Law to the point of taking upon himself "the curse of the Law" incurred by those who do not "abide by the things written in the book of the Law, and do them," for his death took place to redeem them "from the transgressions under the first covenant."11 (Catechism, paragraph 580)

The New Covenant that Jesus revealed to us is governed by the law of love, to love God fully and to love our neighbors as ourselves. This covenant is one of relationship with God the Father, who wants to be known by all human beings.

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
        after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their minds,
        and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
        and they shall be my people.
And they shall not teach one another
        or say to each other, 'Know the Lord,'
for they shall all know me,
        from the least of them to the greatest.
(Hebrews 8:10-11)

Wisdom Connection
In this parable, first appearances do not account for everything. The son who behaved badly by saying no, proved to be obedient in the end, and the son who behaved ever so righteously by saying yes, showed himself to be woefully disobedient. The response of each son reflects a particular faith journey. Some people experience God's love and say they are going to share it with others but never do. Others resist God's love, saying no to God over and over, but later they reconsider and go on to share God's love with all around them. Even if our hearts and minds are open momentarily, the grace of God's forgiveness can bring about an abrupt change of direction in our lives.

This Sunday's Gospel tells us to find security in a dynamic relationship with God, not in religion. Jesus argues vehemently with people who place their trust in the things of religion--the rituals, the rules, and the security of doing what is prescribed--instead of placing their trust in the God who invites them into an intimate relationship.

Jesus's words are hope-filled; we always have an opportunity to change our hearts and minds and do the will of the Father. Just as the first son took this opportunity, we can too. After all, isn't conversion about the ability to change and follow God more closely?

Acknowledgments
The scriptural quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Catholic Edition. Copyright © 1993 and 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

The quotations labeled Catechism are from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America. Copyright © 1994 by the United States Catholic Conference, Inc.--Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.

The Lord's Prayer is taken from Catholic Household Blessings and Prayers. Copyright © 1988 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Inc., Washington, DC. All rights reserved.

Endnotes Cited in Quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church
1. Luke 2:34.
2. Cf. John 1:19; 2:18; 5:10; 7:13; 9:22; 18:12; 19:38; 20:19.
3. John 7:48-49.
4. Cf. Luke 13:31.
5. Cf. Luke 7:36; 14:1.
6. Cf. Matthew 22:23-24; Luke 20:39.
7. Cf. Matthew 6:18.
8. Cf. Mark 12:28-34.
9. Cf. Galatians 4:4.
10. Jeremiah 31:33; Isaiah 42:3, 6.
11. Galatians 3:13; 3:10; Hebrews 9:15.

Martyrs of Korea
September 20 is the memorial of the Martyrs of Korea.

On this date the Church remembers 103 people, ordained and laypeople, who were martyred in the early days of the Church in Korea. Among those remembered on this date is Saint Andrew Kim Taegon. He was the first native Korean priest and was tortured and beheaded in 1846 for his faith.

For more information about Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, go to http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-andrew-kim-taegon/. For more information on the Martyrs of Korea, go to http://saints.sqpn.com/martyr11.htm.