Sounds good—even easy—when you first hear Jesus answering the lawyer’s question about finding eternal life.
The lawyer knows the right answer. I know the right answer. Maybe you do, too.
And even if I could love God every moment, seeking to follow and share God’s love twenty-four-seven, I know I will fail on the “neighbor” half of the equation.
I want to be that person, but I’m just not. I try, over and over. Sometimes I get it right. But sometimes I turn my back because—why?—they’re on the wrong side of the street. Inconvenient.
My church is looking to start a food pantry. I’m not sure what the schedule will be. I’ll wait and see. But what about the people who are hungry today?
That guy on the street corner. He looks too clean, probably a fake, there to take advantage.
So, in the course of a day, a month, a year, I talk myself out of any responsibility for some of my neighbors.
And then I recall kindnesses done for me at a cost to the kindness-doer.
Fifty years ago, I ran out of gas on Interstate 10, heading to work. I was driving my new-to-me Fiat 124, and had yet to master the fuel reading. You know, when it’s on E, how much farther could I go?
As I pulled over to the side I wondered: Could I have found a more isolated spot to be stranded?
Wait, a car is pulling over. Praying it’s the Good Samaritan and not the Boston strangler, I held my hand out with a fuel can in it.
The man seemed nice. I gave him all my money—$2—and off he went.
Time slowed to a standstill. Was he coming back? Why was I so gullible? This guy could be miles down the highway.
I sat in the driver’s seat and waited.
Then, there he was. Pulling his car in behind mine, he opened the gas can and began to pour it into my thirsty little tank.
It was all so quick, then he was gone, and I was on my way to work.
But for fifty-plus years, I have carried this story with me, solid proof of the kindness of strangers, that good exists, and to try to be a blessing myself whenever I can. Oh, and to not let the needle even get close to E.
Scripture offerings for today include Jesus’ feeding of the 4,000–not to be confused with the feeding of the 5,000.
Some of the takeaways from each are similar, for example, Jesus feeding stressed, burdened, forsaken people looking to catch a break.
We know these stories, right?
Well, I thought I did. Until, as a freshly minted priest in 2006, someone pointed out the “trick” in Matthew’s version of the feeding of the 4,000.
A side note, Jesus affirms that there were, in fact, two mass feedings in the wilderness: The one for 5,000 occurred in Jewish territory; and the one for 4,000 occurring in Gentile territory.
The “trick” we see spelled out in the 4,000 miracle meals should also be assumed for the 5,000, as the data for estimating attendance was the same. For census and other official counts, they only counted the men. Not the women and children.
BUT that’s not how these crowd calculations were done. See it for yourself:
“Those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women and children.”*
So, my math says, for an all-inclusive household total calculated at 5 to 7 people, there were more like 24,000 to 30,000 human beings whose hunger was addressed in the two meals.
Mary Patricia Trainor
*Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible (Orbis Books, 1994).
I tend to agree with Mark Twain that it’s sometimes hardest to follow Jesus’ wishes the clearer they are stated.
We can struggle all over
the place with passages that are complex, their meaning obscure. I don’t feel any pressure to define it when better minds than mine haven’t been able to do so over the centuries.
But when it’s clear, such as today’s Gospel from Mark, I have little excuse. So let’s take a look.
Jesus says to follow him requires three things:
Deny myself and place him above all;
Pick up my cross—following Jesus costs me something; and,
Prioritize his values over my own.
Now, of course, I realize the trap of clarity. If we don’t understand something, it’s no wonder we may miss something. Perhaps I can be excused for that.
It might be enjoyable to pick one of these for a study conversation. And “too hard” is not an acceptable answer!
This can make for a rousing conversation, especially if our guard is down. And, remember, that carrying a cross does include any burden associated with a mother-in-law’s visit!
Jesus does much of his ministry at, around, or in the Sea of Galilee. He teaches from the back of a boat, he overfills nets with fishes, he even walks on the water. He demonstrates his strengths for all to see and believe. But only a fraction of folks join him. It must have been astounding, yet only a few respond to such powerful deeds.
I can testify as to how challenging it can be to sustain a faith once proclaimed. Across a lifetime. Thickenings and thinnings. My dear mother once said all relationships go back and forth on a continuum. Even our relationship with God.
As to seaside miracles, I have one of my own.
In the early 1950s, my family lived in Southern California. We were near enough to the Pacific Ocean to go there on the spur of the moment.
My father’s favorite last-minute jaunt was to Newport Beach, where massive stones formed a breakwater to calm the sea for incoming vessels.
When I say massive stones, these are house-sized rocks that look like a failed Jenga effort, dumped there to form an irregular string.
Daddy liked to walk to the sea across them. My mother and brother loved hopping from one big rock to another, despite the enormous chasms that sometimes had to be breached.
On one particular trip, the stones seemed larger than ever and the gaps between them wider and deeper.
As the three of them bounced on ahead, I froze in place at the first major chasm.
It was awhile before they noticed, and were horrified to realize I was not with them.
Daddy ran back and reached down to me, his arm outstretched, his hand open.
I squirmed. I cried. I looked down through the big space to see water roiling below, then up to see Daddy’s arm still outstretched.
That seaside “rescue” comes to mind today. It’s a precious memory of my father—and, more currently, a beautiful metaphor of how near God is at every moment—and how willing to help.
Repetition is a great teacher. Repetition is how we learn things that are vital to our lives, but of themselves may not secure a place in our memory.
Repeat. The alphabet.
Repeat. The times tables.
Repeat. EGBDF.
So, if we want to remember something, repetition may be a good first step.
Jesus, we know, was a teacher who repeated things he wanted his people to recall. Stay awake. Be alert. Watch, for the day is surely coming. You will know when. The time is now.
The purpose is to keep key truths before us, within us, etched in minds, carried out by hands. Or, bad outcomes avoided because we are attentive.
It may be, also, that we use repetition as a way to keep certain important worldly things ever present in our minds.
ZIP code. Phone number. Numerical address. PINs. Birthdates, anniversaries. Last four digits of our SSN.
As we age, many things we committed to memory through repetition begin to elude our grasp.
At first, we fake it, change the topic, crack a joke. Oft times we lose many pieces of what once composed a life.
A dear friend of mine in California received the Alzheimer’s diagnosis this week. Those of us who loved her in brighter days, love her still. And long after she loses the memories of us, we will always love her.
Maybe there’s a lesson here. Love is passed along like the proverbial torch, from one of us to another, generation to generation.
Remembering the details of our lives makes living them more efficient.
But the greatest meaning of our lives is not captured by remembering details. Rather, it is the measure of love that comes to us, carried along, shared with others, that softens the edges of who we might have been. Love makes us the best us we can be. And, hopefully, love lingers in our wake, free to all who follow along.
Opinions on this seem to have softened over the years. Every once in a while, though, the idea of something being an “idol” can still kick up some dust.
You may recall the Old Testament story in Exodus 32. Moses had gone up the mount to speak with God. The people thought his lengthened absence meant trouble for them.
Aaron, next in charge, suggested that the restless people melt their gold possessions. From the melted gold, they created the Golden Calf for sacrifice in worship.
Every once in a while the idea of idolatry kicks up some dust, and it pays to re-examine just exactly who or what it is we worship.
Money? Fame? Power? First place in line?
Another way to look at the question is this: What or who do I choose over God?
Taken seriously, such questions may lead to some squirming. Maybe that’s good for us.
Years ago, as a newly ordained Episcopal priest, I received my share of pastoral calls to make.
Often, these calls involved visiting memory care clients.
Often, these calls involved people who wouldn’t know they didn’t know me. The staff called in a local pastor when they felt “something like that” might be helpful.
And I learned something I have held onto all these years.
Today’s Gospel reminds me of that truth. In a teaching moment with his disciples, Jesus taught them how to pray.
If you’re a church regular, or maybe attended reliably as a child, the words Jesus offered a couple of thousand years ago are still in your heart. If someone starts them off, more than likely you find you can step into them as though it was yesterday.
Embedded in our souls as they are, these words can often come from memory care receivers—even when they cannot remember loved ones.
Old, familiar words, learned years ago through repetition, come rolling out of us as needed.
When my father was in the last days of a long cancer journey, he would say very vile things to my mother. Long, laborious recollections of her failures. Hurtful, biting things spewed forth from him. Sometimes things that were true, sometimes things that were not true, simply the result of a brain that was dying.
Sometimes she would call me in the middle of those tirades. Sometimes that helped, but I wasn’t always available. So, I asked what she does when she couldn’t get me by phone.
“I say the Lord’s Prayer, over and over. It calms me down.”
Over and over, written on hearts decades earlier, this prayer continues to console and protect:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton was a prolific writer. And his writing has been a source of comfort to me no matter what is going on in the world, or simply to me in my life. Consider the following:
Speak words of hope.
Be human in this most inhuman of ages.
Guard the image of man,
for it is the image of God.
What I found novel and most helpful in this quote is the reminder that even the person who has harmed me the most—that person—deserves respect and care because there is more to him than his treatment of me. He, just as I am, just as you are, warrants guarding because we bear the image of God within us. It may be buried deep, crusted over, denied more than once, but it is there.
Here’s another Merton gift:
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Reminders such as these serve notice that each of us presents a bit of God to those whom we meet.
I hope that anyone looking at me can recognize, if only briefly, some resemblance to the source of any goodness they see.
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, a time for celebration.
We drink green beer, eat corned beef and cabbage, and offer a shamrock for good luck.
Nothing’s too much for the man who chased snakes out of Ireland. Right? I agree, but let’s clear up a few things first.
The man we call Patrick was a slave who returned to be among his former captors.
This is the core of the man, and it’s an exceptional response. Here’s some more.
At the age of 16, Patrick was taken prisoner by Irish raiders and taken to Ireland. There, he spent around six years, enslaved as a shepherd — lonely and afraid, turning to religion for solace.
Most people, once they escape their “prison,” never look back. Patrick did the opposite. He felt there was work there to be done.
After six years of captivity, Patrick heard a voice telling him his ship was ready to take him home.
He traveled 200 miles to the nearest port and managed to persuade a captain to let him stow away. He made it back to Britain and his family.
A nice enough story if it ended there.
But it doesn’t.
After years of study, he returned to Ireland — his mission twofold: to minister to Christians already in Ireland, and to convert the non-believers.
He wasn’t responding to an obligation. He was responding to “a calling.”
And he wasn’t even Irish. He was born in either Scotland or northern England and described himself as a Roman and a Briton.
“Patrick” was not his birth name. When the Pope authorized him to evangelize Ireland, he was prophetically named Patricius, meaning “father of citizens.”
Because of his enslavement, Patrick missed out on formal education. His education was limited to religious teachings, and he apparently taught himself to read and write beyond basic Latin.
Most of us would applaud these results. But the lack of formal schooling embarrassed him — yet his success as a missionary is attributed to tenacity and “dogged determination,” even in the face of doubts about his own self-worth.
He actually wrote about this insecurity in his autobiography, Confessio — one of the oldest personal spiritual memoirs.
Here’s a surprising twist: Patrick was never canonized by the Catholic Church — simply because he lived before there was a formal canonization process.
He was proclaimed a saint by the people of Ireland His feast day wasn’t even added to the universal Church calendar until the 1600s.
Oh, and the snake stories are not real. Ireland has no snakes, then or now. The legend is regarded as a metaphor for Patrick’s Christianizing efforts, perhaps drawing on the Judeo-Christian tradition of snakes as symbols of evil.
In other words, he wasn’t driving out reptiles — he was driving out paganism.
Patrick’s story is about a traumatized teen-ager who became a willing exile for the sake of the very people who had enslaved him.
That’s not a story about green beer, corned beef and cabbage, or even the noble shamrock.
That’s a story about forgiveness, resilience, and radical purpose.
The sentence above proved to be an important lesson in my life, courtesy of a dear friend long since gone.
She’d catch me off guard in the middle of a rant (for want of a better word.) I might be speaking of a family member or friend—someone I knew pretty well. I was frustrated that they were not showing their “true” colors. Maybe I had them pegged as hard-hearted, and they just did a loving thing. Or maybe I thought they were tough, but then saw them well up with tears upon seeing a fragile sparrow deceased on the ground.
I could go on, but I hope I have made the point of my friend Martha Petrey. “MT (what she called me), nobody is just one thing. You miss out on lots of wonderful surprises by confining them to a single definition.”
I know that is true, but I also know that “categorizing” brings some control to an otherwise uncontrollable world. Hence, it makes me feel safe. It’s hard to give up those two assurances.
This week I encountered her wisdom once again.
My brother Jim texted me a long poem written by our paternal grandfather. I once had possession of it, and how it ended up in his home in Milwaukee is a mystery to us both.
Titled “Prodigal Girl,” the poem takes Luke 15:11-32 as its inspiration, only it flips the script. Ask yourself this, Ben Trainor seems to pose, would the story even appeal to Luke’s readers if the wayward offspring were a girl?
Jim and I never knew GrandpaTrainor since he died before we were born. All we had to go on were other people’s memories or opinions.
Most of them never knew Martha Petrey, or someone like her who understands that nobody is just one thing.
By most accounts that we ever heard, Ben was characterized as a stern, punitive, by-the-book man, and a staunch Roman Catholic who believed no one other than RCs would cross the threshold of heaven.
He was a railroad engineer, which means he was gone from home a lot, so we think Grandma probably filled in many blanks for her children and their children
Our mother, who somehow “got him” better than his own kids did, told us there was much more depth to the man than was ever revealed to his children.
She also shared that he loved to write, and was frequently published in Railroad Magazine.
Perhaps “Prodigal Girl” graced its pages.
Commentary by Mary Trainer about Prodigal Girl
Narrative reading of Prodigal Girl Poem
Prodigal Girl
By Benjamin Trainor (1923)
Historical Context
Written in 1923, ‘Prodigal Girl’ reflects a period in American society when moral expectations for women were rigid and public judgment could be swift and unforgiving. The 1920s were a time of social change—women had recently gained the right to vote, and cultural norms were shifting—yet traditional standards of virtue remained deeply entrenched. In this poem, Benjamin Trainor challenges the double standard that celebrated the return of the ‘prodigal son’ while condemning the ‘prodigal girl.’ His words offer a compassionate critique of societal hypocrisy and advocate for mercy, dignity, and fairness.
