Capuchin Retreat depends on prayer, volunteer work and financial donations to continue its ministry. Give now

Author: Tim Hinkle

Warning Signs

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

Major events in history are usually the culmination of a series of warning signs — signs that frequently have gone unheeded until it is too late.

That’s what was happening in Jerusalem at the time of Ezekiel, today’s prophet.

We’ve all heard about the “Babylonian exile” — a stretch of time when the people of Judah were taken out of Jerusalem and forced to live without their temple to God.

There were spiritual reasons for this exile, Ezekiel reminds us. People in Judah were worshiping idols and not God.

And this exile to Babylon did not begin all at once; it happened gradually. The Babylonians conquered Judah in a series of invasions, with Babylon only eventually taking over the Jewish kingdom, bit by bit.

Ezekiel was a victim of one of the first invasions, and so he began writing at a time when many of Judah’s citizens — but not all of them — were victims of war.

Importantly, the temple had not yet fallen in Jerusalem. But Ezekiel writes in warning about its impending destruction. That’s what today’s reading is all about.

Today’s first reading is filled with some doom and gloom — and Ezekiel wrote it that way on purpose. Jerusalem was guilty of serious sins against God, and therefore deserved its exile, Ezekiel is telling us.

But there are hints of hope and optimism in Ezekiel, too.

First, there is the promise of mercy for those marked with the “Thau,” or an x-shaped symbol, on their foreheads. This was the mark given in Ezekiel’s prophecy to those who had not participated in Judah’s idolatry, but who had wept over the condition of the temple.

Moreover, God’s departure from the temple and the city of Jerusalem is depicted in Ezekiel and elsewhere in the Old Testament as gradual — as if God was patiently waiting in hope to see whether the gathering storm clouds of exile would result in repentance.

And, if we were to keep reading from today’s section of Ezekiel, we’d see that shortly after today’s first reading, the prophet provides the assurance that the Babylonian exile will not last forever, but will end when God gathers together God’s people and brings them back to their homeland.

God has wounded his people, but will bind up again.

In a sense, that is also the message from the Gospel. The message from Jesus is all about repentance, a process that involves the relationship we have with others and with the church.

Sin and self-centeredness bring us outside of our communion with God, just as it brought about exile for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

But this exile need not last forever. We can come back to God.

Today (and every day) represents another opportunity for our return to God. Jesus, who shows up every day on our altars, always offers the same invitation: Come back to him; come back to Jesus and find life and communion.

Scapegoating

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Br. McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

There is something of a cottage industry on social media these days: The posting to the internet of videos of people doing bad or stupid things … and then getting their just deserts.

If I scroll through YouTube, I almost inevitably end up coming across a video titled something like: “Idiot driver crashes into semi.” What’s caught on camera is a video of someone driving too fast or too recklessly, and then slamming into a big truck. Viewers are encouraged to say things like: “Well, he had that coming!”

Or a person might be filmed in the midst of a tense conflict with someone else — sometimes with the person holding the camera — and we’re invited to watch their spectacular, public meltdown. “It’s OK,” we’re supposed to think. “They deserve to be called out and ridiculed!”

It’s easy to turn people into a meme, ridicule their actions and justify our pleasure in our doing so by insisting that it’s all simply a carriage of popular justice.

This isn’t a new phenomenon.

As a friend of mine pointed out to me a few years ago, what goes on in today’s world of social media is simply a modern variation of what we used to call “scapegoating.” We turn our enemies into objects of derision — and tell ourselves that we stand on the side of moral virtue.

Scholars would perhaps point out that this is what’s going on in today’s first reading, which is all about the Assyrians — or the “scoundrels,” as the prophet Nahum calls them.

The Assyrians were hated by just about everyone — and they might have deserved it. They were famously brutal, and had made a lot of enemies, including the Israelites of Nahum’s time.

About a century before he wrote, Assyria had conquered much of Israel, pressing many of Abraham’s descendants into a violent exile.

But by the time of today’s first reading, the Assyrians had fallen to the Babylonians — the Mediterranean world’s newest big empire.

Nahum’s whole purpose in writing was to point out that the Assyrians had finally eaten their humble pie, and that the whole world was taking note.

Today’s first reading seems to take a gleeful bit of pleasure in the Assyrians’ downfall.

There’s a different tone in today’s gospel, in which Jesus prescribes a different way of approaching our relationship to the world — even a world that wanted to crucify him.

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

There is nothing here about breaking one’s enemies. There is nothing here about humiliating one’s opponent — even if we’re sure our opponent deserves to be humiliated.

To be like Jesus, to follow him and be his disciple, is to carry a cross. And our cross, like Jesus’, is a cross that brings healing not only for us, but also for our enemies.

Praying for those we don’t like might not come naturally or by instinct. It’s easier to lash out and to scapegoat.

At Mass, we pray at the altar that in consuming Jesus’ body and blood, we ourselves might be made an eternal offering to God.

As we walk out of this chapel, the ground beneath our feet might well be thought of as the altar on which we make this offering — the place where we carry our own cross.

We might ask: For whom are we carrying that cross today?

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Br. McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

I remember the gymnasium in which the ceremony was held. I remember my family visiting, and getting to show them around my college town — and finally getting to try eating at the nicest restaurant downtown. (Without my parents around, I’d never been able to afford it.)

Most of all, I remember this sensation that the hardest thing I’d worked for all my life was finally over. I had completed my 16th year of education. I had jumped through all the academic hoops that life had put in my way, and I was ready to coast through the rest of my life.

Or so I thought.

I had reached what I thought was the apex of my childhood ambitions, but found that life kept unfolding in front of me. I found out that work didn’t get easier with a college degree; it just kept coming.

The history of my life, you might say, didn’t end with what I’d expected would be its most climactic moment. Life had simply changed direction.

It’s taken me a while to find a way to connect my life to the feast that we celebrate this week: the Assumption of Mary.

For a long time, I simply approached this feast with the idea that here was an historical event from the life of Mary — Mary has gone to heaven — and we as a church were simply memorializing it.

In a certain sense, of course, that’s true. This is an important historical event, and we are memorializing it.

But does it have any connection to our lives today?

I suppose we might begin by meditating on what it means that history did not simply come to an end after Jesus’ death on the cross… or after his resurrection… or after his ascension into heaven.

Indeed, these moments were sort of like humanity’s “graduation ceremony” — the things we’d all been waiting for before the time of Christ.

And, yet, for Mary and for each one of us, life since the year 33 A.D. has kept on going. And we’re left to sort out for ourselves what Jesus’ life and ministry and death and resurrection all mean for us.

Mary’s life shows us that the redemption won on Calvary continues to unfold in time — it didn’t happen once and then the story of humanity was finished. Mary had to get to her assumption.

For Mary, whose relationship with her son was so special, hers was a special type of entry into eternal life. We’re called to the same heaven, though; the same eternity with Jesus.

And that means we still have our lives to live, too. Our own finishing lines to arrive at.

At every Mass, we commemorate once again the re-presentation of all that Jesus did for us at Calvary. This, we might say, is a bit like living, once again, our “graduation ceremony.” It’s the most important thing we’ve waited all our lives to experience — and we get to experience it anew every day.

And if we remain faithful to what the Eucharist calls us to, then we, like Mary, will be able someday to enter into eternal life. (Our “last” graduation ceremony.)

All the World’s a Chapel

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Br. McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

During one of my first official years of formation to become a Capuchin, the other friars and I would attend Mass together every day of the week. We always did so in the same large chapel that was at the center of our formation campus.

The chapel’s front doors were quite large (and heavy), and I remember what it was like to walk through them at the end of each Mass.

“I’m walking out onto my altar now,” I’d tell myself as I walked through those doors and onto the concrete sidewalk outside. I liked to imagine that the whole world beneath my feet was now my “altar.”

The Mass I’d just participated in wasn’t really “over,” I’d think to myself; I was now simply living a continuous reprisal of that Mass, with every moment of the rest of the day an opportunity to experience and re-experience eucharist and sacrifice.

The whole world became my chapel, and every square inch of ground beneath me an altar on which I lived and gave up my life.

This idea began to change the way I looked at everything.

The Mass was no longer something I went to, nor was it something that simply lasted for an hour on Sundays, or thirty minutes on weekdays. Every moment of every day could become an occasion for worship, and everything I experienced in life could find some sort of connection to the Mass.

This was a helpful type of spiritual growth for me, but I encountered problems with it. Inevitably, I’d forget during the day about this wonderful idea that I was “on my altar.” The world that I had decided could remind me of God was always distracting me from God.

If I wasn’t careful, I could lose the sense of spiritual balance and bliss that I’d carried out with me after Mass in the chapel.

Encounters with others could become mundane daily interactions with people who needed something from me: My attention, a task or a job to do, an errand to carry out.

Even as I was learning to try bringing the Mass into my everyday life, I was finding that my everyday life kept preventing my doing so.

It wasn’t until I had a conversation about some of this with a spiritual director that I found a way to try overcoming the problem.

“Find God in all the things that distract you from God.” This was the message my spiritual director gave me, and I suspect there is a great deal of truth in it.

We don’t simply stop celebrating or attending Mass when we walk out of these doors. If we have encountered Jesus in the Eucharist, we can trust that he’ll go with us as we head off into our distracting daily routines.

And if Jesus the Eucharist is with us throughout our day, then every moment of every day can become an occasion to render a simple “thanksgiving” to God (this is exactly what the word “Eucharist” means, after all).

This remains true even if we find ourselves distracted from the sorts of spiritual thoughts that we might wish could stay with us throughout the day.

If a spouse, a child, a boss or co-worker, a neighbor or even a stranger demands of us an attention we’d have rather given to God, we can still find ourselves offering that attention to God, even if our attention seems aimed at the spouse, a child, a boss or a stranger.

Jesus in today’s Gospel is having a conversation with the Pharisees, who were bothered by the fact that Jesus’ disciples were picking grains of wheat and eating them on the Sabbath.

Jesus’ response was straight from the prophet Hosea: God prefers mercy over sacrifice. In a way, the merciful acts we show to others — the bits of our attention we pay to those who demand it of us, even when we’d rather not — become acts of sacrifice.

The moments we say a simple “thank you” to God during the course of the day — and we should be able to say “thank you” even in the midst of anything — become little echoes of the Eucharist we are about to share together this morning.

Let us be merciful to everyone outside these doors, and let us allow that mercy to become an extension of the sacrifice in which we now participate.

The Conventional Wisdom

Posted on by Tim Hinkle
Photograph of Rodin's

Wednesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time

Judges 9:6-15; Matthew 20:1-16

Following the commonly accepted wisdom isn’t always the wisest thing to do. Abimelech asked the leaders of Shechem whether they thought it would be better for their people to be led by 70 people or by one. He convinced them to accept one, and he proceeded to murder his 70 brothers. Abimelech proved to be a terrible leader. Shechem soon revolted against him, and he was eventually killed when a woman in a house he was attacking dropped a stone on his head.

In today’s gospel parable, Jesus challenges our commonly accepted notions of what is fair. The master of a vineyard gives the same wage to his day laborers, regardless of when they started their work.  Those who started early grumble with resentment. Those who started work with just an hour to spare are silent. We don’t know if they were overwhelmed with gratitude or simply made a quick get-away to celebrate their good fortune.

The point of this story is two-fold: it demonstrates that the gates of salvation are open to all, and it underscores God’s almost incomprehensible generosity and the richness of his grace.  We live in a world that often demands that there be winners and losers, the chosen and the left behind. The kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed is a different world, and he invites and challenges us to live in it. jc

—————————————————————————————————————

Miércoles de la XX semana del tiempo ordinario

Jueces 9,6-15; Mateo 20,1-16

Seguir la sabiduría comúnmente aceptada no siempre es lo más sabio. Abimelec preguntó a los dirigentes de Siquem si pensaban que sería mejor para su pueblo ser dirigido por setenta personas o por una. Los convenció de que aceptaran a uno, y procedió a asesinar a sus 70 hermanos. Abimelec demostró ser un líder terrible. Siquem pronto se rebeló contra él, y acabó muriendo cuando una mujer de una casa que estaba atacando le tiró una piedra a la cabeza.

En la parábola del Evangelio de hoy, Jesús desafía nuestras nociones comúnmente aceptadas de lo que es justo. El dueño de una viña da el mismo salario a sus jornaleros, independientemente de cuándo hayan empezado a trabajar.  Los que empezaron temprano se quejan con resentimiento. Los que empezaron a trabajar con sólo una hora de sobra se callan. No sabemos si estaban abrumados por la gratitud o simplemente hicieron una escapada rápida para celebrar su buena fortuna.

El sentido de esta historia es doble: demuestra que las puertas de la salvación están abiertas para todos, y subraya la generosidad casi incomprensible de Dios y la riqueza de su gracia.  Vivimos en un mundo que a menudo exige que haya vencedores y vencidos, elegidos y excluidos. El reino de Dios que Jesús proclamó es un mundo diferente, y nos invita y desafía a vivir en él. Jc

Asistencia de traducción proporcionada por DeepL.com®

Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash

Love Your Enemies

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Fr. Tom Zelinski, OFM Cap.

On the 7th Sunday of the Year, Series C, we hear one of the more challenging and central teachings of Jesus: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” This is another example of how Jesus challenges our natural human tendencies.

He is, in effect, telling us to be more like our merciful God, who lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust. He is telling us to act out of mercy and certainly not in anger and revenge. Our world still badly needs to learn that lesson.

When I read this passage, I stop to consider if I have any enemies. I am not aware of people who are trying to hurt me in any way. We who can say that are blessed. However, if not enemies, there are people who do things that I don’t like and who can stir anger in me. I disagree with them. They do things which seem wrong and unjust. How would Jesus want me to think and act with regard to them? I cannot agree with their behavior. Perhaps I can try to better understand. And I certainly can pray for them. I can be honest about my own faults.

No matter how hard we try to live the Gospel, we will never be in complete agreement with everyone. There will remain evil in the world. We will stumble ourselves once in a while. We will have to leave much up to the mercy of God.

The strong words of Sunday’s Gospel remain an ideal which we may never fulfill in this life. We keep reading and listening and allowing these words to speak to us and slowly transform our lives.

Kingdom of Heaven

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Fr. Tom Zelinski, OFM Cap.

In our Gospel passages for the 17th Week of Ordinary Time, there are many references to the “Kingdom of Heaven.” In some other places and translations there will be references to the “Kingdom of God” or “The Reign of God.” All point to the same reality. But what comes to mind when we hear of the “Kingdom of Heaven?” We may have different ideas about that, but the actual meaning can be a bit unclear. It is not first of all a place to which we travel.

During the 17th Week, we read some of the parables of the Kingdom in Matthew 13. And as the early Christian community reflected on Jesus’ words about the Kingdom, they realized he did not describe it in precise terms. And so we hear over and over, “the Kingdom of Heaven is like” something. It is like the seed scattered on the land. It is like weeds growing up among wheat. It is like a great catch of fish. It is like a treasure or pearl of great price. It is “like” these things.

And so, what are we to think? Among other things, we may see the Kingdom of Heaven as a way of living or a state of mind. We might say those living in the Kingdom of Heaven are those who live in a certain way, who express certain values in their lives. They are, in other words, those who try to live by all the teachings of Jesus. They do this as individuals and in community with others.

The Catholic Church does not equal the Kingdom of Heaven, but we hope that Catholic people participate in the Kingdom in their behavior, along with their brothers and sisters in other groups and denominations.

Those living in the Kingdom of Heaven are those , indeed, who hear the words of Jesus and follow them with their lives. Could Jesus say to any of us: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like your life?”

St. Bonaventure

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Fr. Tom Zelinski, OFM Cap.

On July 15, the Church honors St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscan mystic, theologian, and Minister General of the Franciscan Order. He is often called the “Second Founder” of the Franciscan Order for a couple of reasons. He lived in the 13th Century and joined the Order not too long after the death of St. Francis.

He took up the ideas and spirit of St. Francis and gave them some theological form and structure. His famous work, The Journey of the Soul into God, tells of a way of prayer and spirituality that incorporates the Franciscan spirit. He builds on Francis’ appreciation of nature and all of creation as reflecting the presence of God in all things.

He is associated with the phrase vestigia Dei, the “footprints of God,” which are to be found all around us in the created world.

Bonaventure is also considered the Second Founder in the way he helped to reconcile two factions in the Order, which were having disagreements about how to truly follow the spirit of Francis.

He was asked to become a bishop and he refused until finally he was prevailed upon to become bishop of Albano and was made a cardinal. With that is connected the little story of how delegates from Rome came to give him his cardinal’s red hat. He asked them at first to wait outside and hang it on a tree while he helped wash the dishes. The humble spirit of a great man.

“Our” Father

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Fr. Tom Zelinski, OFM Cap.

The Gospel reading for Thursday of Week 11 contains Jesus’ teaching on prayer, which we have come to call the “Our Father.”

It is valuable to focus on the first word, “our.” At the meetings of some groups, the members pray this prayer and before they start, someone will ask “Whose Father?” And the prayer begins.

We pray to our Father, and not merely my Father. It is a reminder that we are all children of God and therefore related to each other as brothers and sisters. Everyone, not only Christians, but all people are thus related.

The human race has not learned that lesson well. Down through the centuries, it seems the history of humanity is a history of warfare, violence, racism and oppression. But we must not forget the many millions who did indeed try to live respecting their brothers and sisters.

And so, given the news of each day, we still have a lot to learn, based on the simple beginning of the Lord’s Prayer. We could also include concern for the earth and its creatures. Our God has created and presides over all. Francis of Assisi liked to call many creatures his brothers and sisters, all in view of our Creator God.

As we pray the prayer so often, we might see the many applications of that word, “our.” Lord, teach us to pray.

Encouragement

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Fr. Tom Zelinski, OFM Cap.

As a priest, I get to listen to lots of people of all ages. Often with people who have been on the earth for some time, a similar theme appears. People who have been trying to pray, attend church, receive sacraments for many years often feel as though they should be “better” by now. They “should” have more patience, more charity, more kindness, be better at prayer.

It is probably natural that we wonder “How am I doing?” And many of us tend too easily to lean toward the negative and think less of ourselves than might be accurate.

The Gospel parables of the recent Sunday have something to say about all that. Jesus uses images of farm crops and the famous mustard seed. Many things come from very small beginnings, and often grow and develop in quiet and mysterious ways.

I would suggest the good people who tell me about their shortcomings have no idea how much good they have done in their long lives, how many good seeds they have planted by their care, their hard work, their responsible tending to children, relatives and friends.

Measuring such things is not necessary. We can leave that up to God, and keep on, in the present and the future, planting our seeds of kindness, justice, and compassion.

Stay up to date with Capuchin Retreat