Who Are You?

Saturday, at morning mass, the Monsignor read from one of the daily Christian meditation magazines (I forgot which).  He read: We cannot find/embrace Jesus without finding Him in the Trinity, without finding Him in humanity.  He said that was a quote from a well-known scholar, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis.  As he quoted the words, my mind recalled some recent readings of mine which had taught me a new lesson unity of being, and now God seemed to be repeating that lesson to me, so I’d “get it.”  But when the monsignor noted the author of that quote, I REALLY “got it.”

A book has been sitting on my bookshelf for many months.  It is a very thick book, about 900 pages, written by the man the monsignor had quoted.  The book is titled Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word. It is the 4th and final book in a series of meditations on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.  The first three books went very deep into what St. Matthew and the people he was writing for thought, and how they thought and acted in the time and culture of Jesus.  It is not nearly as simple as you might hear in any sermon.  Going word by word, Leiva-Merikakis doesn’t just interpret the original gospel, or even just interpret the original Greek language which he uses for his meditations, but he puts the Greek words, phrase by phrase into the culture of the time they were written.  Leiva-Merikakis takes you back to that time, and you understand and feel as the original hearers of those words did.  This final book starts with Matthew 26: 1-5, the start of the plot to kill Jesus.  The reason this book has sat on my bookshelf is that it is on the Passion and death of Jesus.  In a way, I fear reading this book and not just knowing, but FEELING the death of Jesus and all that He and His followers went through, intimately, in my very being.  

Various other books I have been reading lately have shown me something I never before knew about Jesus, and the Jewish faith He was born into.  Back then, there was no word “religion” to describe the Jewish faith or any other faith.  The word Jewish was a word which told you how those people lived.  They went to Temple, had those feasts, etc., etc..  Looking at what they did, you described how they lived as being Jewish.  That’s why when the followers of Jesus, most of them Jews in the start, started doing some different things it bothered the Jewish people --- the followers of Jesus were not living like Jews do.  And at a certain point the Jews described this growing group of people as Christians, followers of Christ.  It was because they lived that way.  There was a recent song titled “You’ll know they are Christians by their love.”  That is how you knew any “religion” in the time of Jesus.  You described people by how they lived and acted.  Christians acted with love.  (I wonder if a stranger today, looking at how we live and act, would know we are Christians.) 

Other recent books/reflections I have recently read describe in more detail that “knowing” possessed by faith and faith-filled people.  It is not just a simple set of rules, like a catechism.  So, Jesus became human, in part, to show humans how they were created to live.  His disciples followed Him to hear His words yes, but also to see and feel how He lived.  A disciple wasn’t like a student who memorized words from a textbook, they absorbed who the teacher was.  In part, that was why Jesus was with them for three years.  And even then, it didn’t all come together until the Holy Spirit came down upon them.  His disciples were created in the Image of God, to live and after a period of time of watching and listening to Jesus, to make who He was part of “who they were.”  

You have make Christianity your very being, how you live, growing in love of God and neighbor.

Leiva-Merikakis: 

We cannot find/embrace Jesus without finding Him in the Trinity, without finding Him in humanity.

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I was driving in rural areas past some old farmhouses, and I saw one which had some gravestones nearby.  I recalled that used to be the normal way of life and death in this country, people and families living near each other, and graves at a common family site or next to their common church.  Living in community enabled people to absorb the family way of life, which for Christians usually meant living, eating, and praying together.  That’s why the Eucharist is called communion, the food that brings us together.

I’m saddened when I see families break the family unity.  They don’t see the total-ness of being they are destroying.  The ones who break away often justify their action by saying: “but that is who I am.”  

I wonder if Adam and Eve, still in the Garden of Eden today, would they describe the reason to choose the eating of the apple as being: “but that is who I am.”  They are different from the people God created them to be, in His image.  Maybe they should use those words, because in their very being they went from beings who loved and trusted in God in all things, to ones who didn’t trust Him anymore.  And human beings, now on earth, have been trying to rebuild that original level of trust ever since, that level of BEING.

My Catholic faith and family is focused on bringing back that union; to once more be one with Him and His family, becoming one in being with Him.  

So, is that who you are?