Reflection for March 22, 2009

The Fourth Sunday of Lent
2 Chronicles 36:14-16; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21e

The readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent prompt us to reflect on God’s call to ongoing conversion spoken in prophetic, often unexpected, people and events. The readings invite reflection on the experience of exile – that of the Israelites, and that which may sometimes be of our own making:  the exile of separation from our own truth when we choose not to live in the light of God’s word spoken to us.

Chronicles details for us how the Israelites rejected the prophets God sent them, and how they were carried into Babylon. When we are not in truth with ourselves, with our relationships, with our commitment to how God calls us in our lives, we know the exile of our fracturedness, of our inner contradictions. Our exile is the darkness that is ours when we alienate ourselves from life-giving choices.

Robert Maloney, CM, develops this theme in his article, “Truth: Religious Simplicity Revisited.”* He points out that our final integrity comes from God’s forgiving, healing love. It is gift. In later verses in Chronicles, the Israelites experience this gift of God’s compassion in the unexpected figure of Cyrus, the King of Persia who allowed the Israelites who had survived to return to their home. We too experience God’s compassion in our lives in the words and actions of sometimes surprising people and events.

Ephesians so wonderfully describes faith as gift. Our being saved through faith comes, not from us, or from our works, but as “the immeasurable riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” We come to live in the awareness of the great love God has for us. We come to desire to live our call as God’s creation committed to living in the promise of being raised with Jesus. Today we are called to attend to the Word that opens us to the truth in our lives. This week, we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation. How does Mary invite us to become complete openness to the truth, the light, the Word of God in our lives, to become complete potential for God as she was?

John’s Gospel describes this same struggle to live in the truth, a struggle that brings us into the light. It gives us the image of Jesus lifted up, inviting us to believe in a Word that is enigmatic and difficult, that can find a home only in hearts open to receive the gift.

During a recent visit to Emmitsburg, Maryland, I experienced a prophetic event. I participated in the Eucharistic celebration in the chapel in the White House where Elizabeth Seton and our early Sisters lived and prayed and educated children. Their presence was tangible. Together, the members of the Company of Charity Formation Personnel entered in spirit into the struggles of Elizabeth and her Sisters to live in the truth of how God was calling them there in the Valley, and eventually beyond, to distant missions. We joined also in celebrating Eucharist in the lower church at St. Mary’s, in Paca Street, Baltimore, where we renewed our vows to God, through the charism of Charity, in the place where Elizabeth had pronounced her vows as a Sister of Charity. We prayed for the outpouring of the Spirit described in John 3, on all the members of our congregations, as Jesus poured out his Spirit on Elizabeth and our early sisters.

Like the Israelites in today’s reading, we need to hear the word of God in the messengers God sends us, inviting us to ongoing conversion. The Gospel and our Congregation’s Direction Statements call us to act with preferential option for the poor, especially women and children, to act on behalf of immigrants, to work for justice for all in our church, and to live the tenets of the Earth Charter. There are prophets among us who call us to involvement and accountability in each of these areas to which we Sisters, Associates, and Colleagues of Charity are committed in 2009 as we celebrate the Bicentennial of our founding.

Reflection by Sister Charlotte Raftery, SC
(Sister Charlotte serves as Candidate Director on the New Membership
Team of the Sisters of Charity of New York, and as a faculty advisor
for graduate studentsin social work at Fordham University.)