Pay Attention

Saturday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

See, I am coming to dwell among you, says the LORD. Many nations shall join themselves to the LORD on that day, and they shall be his people and he will dwell among you.  ZECHARIAH 2: 14B-15

“Pay attention to what I am telling you. The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.” But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it, and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.  LUKE 9:44-45

Piety

"America" by Neil Diamond
Far,
We've been traveling far
Without a home
But not without a star

Free,
Only want to be free
We huddle close
Hang on to a dream

On the boats and on the planes
They're coming to America
Never looking back again,
They're coming to America

Study

We are confronted by covenant language as directly as we were confronted by the Gospel message in the halls of Congress this week.  Zechariah universalizes the covenant between God and Israel to include all nations just like Pope Francis did in Washington, New York and Philadelphia. 

But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days—oracle of the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  Jeremiah 31:33

“They shall be my people, and I will be their God” is written in Jeremiah 32:38 is as real to us this week as if the prophet wrote, “They shall be my flock and I shall be their shepherd.”   

Action

Yet, we also must heed the Good News by paying attention to what Jesus uttered and what Pope Francis echoed this week.  This is not just a 2015 re-enactment of a rock group coming to America.  This is a full frontal Argentinian-Jesuit-Roman Catholic Invasion.  In the examples that the Holy Father focused upon, we saw that the church must stand for the immigrant, the marginalized, the weak and the powerless. 

In a welcome break from the drumbeat of Presidential campaigning and government shutting down, @Pontifex invited us to look in the mirror and see Jesus looking back.  @Pontifex invited us to look at our borders and see Jesus crossing the Rio Grande.  @Pontifex invited us to look at the land and see the hand of God at work in all creation. 

If you do not know much about Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton, take some time to look up something about their lives or check out a key book from the library.  The Long Loneliness is Dorothy’s biography and The Seven Storey Mountain is Fr. Merton’s.    

You will learn that Servant of God Dorothy was a radical, divorced, single mother who had an abortion and was arrested often up until she was 80 years old for her protests against war and injustice.  However, none of that stopped Dorothy Day from converting to become a devout Catholic and a champion of the poor after she learned what love meant with the birth of her daughter. (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/14/february-8-2013-the-life-of-dorothy-day/14669/)

Can you try to live their commitment to the Gospel? 

Remember the Holy Father’s words at the United Nations:  “Solemn commitments, however, are not enough, even though they are a necessary step toward solutions. The classic definition of justice which I mentioned earlier contains as one of its essential elements a constant and perpetual will: Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius sum cuique tribuendi. Our world demands of all government leaders a will which is effective, practical and constant, concrete steps and immediate measures for preserving and improving the natural environment.”