Daily Reflection Thursday of the Second Week of Lent

For those who loved and were served by Auxiliary Bishop David O'Connell, the shadows of the Lenten journey to the cross have appeared early this season. Shock, grief, and tributes to a life so very well lived greeted the news that the Bishop had been shot dead at his home in Los Angeles on February 18th. Early in his priesthood he had left his native Ireland with an intentional decision to abide in a community rife with gang and gun violence, poverty, and fractured families. His presence and ministry, on the ground and among the people, revealed a special love he shared with the immigrant community and those on the margins. "He always said yes," said a lawyer who had served in advocacy roles with him. "I have seen him sit and talk and pray with people at shelters at the border who had been deported and had little reason for hope. He paid rent for immigrant families in LA who were not allowed to work and were in distress. He did retreats for newly arrived migrant families to teach people to pray and to know Jesus' love for them." 
I don't know what Gospel passage was chosen for Bishop O'Connell's March 3rd funeral Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, but Jesus' parable in today's Lectionary of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his door would have been a most appropriate, study-in-contrast, selection. Bishop O'Connell, resting now, we pray, in eternal peace on the bosom of Abraham, leaves a legacy of everything the rich man in Jesus' telling wasn't. No fine, purple clothing, no dining scrumptiously while a Lazarus -- the only named person in any of Jesus' teachings or parables -- of Bishop O'Connell's own day went unnoticed or ignored at the border or the gate.

This challenging teaching from Jesus is a study in contrasts all its own. We read of one man full of possessions, the other empty except for his name. We have no idea of how the rich man in Jesus' parable became wealthy. Inheritance, fraud, theft, the fruits of hard work as an entrepreneur? We have no idea why Lazarus, the poor man, is so broken. Is he unable to work because of an injury? Is he mentally ill? Was he just lazy? What we do know is that when both men have passed through the last gate, the boundary that has divided them in life is still dividing them in death, with their status now ironically reversed. And unlike other parables from Jesus, the meaning is less than enigmatic for us -- and surely too for the Pharisees who Luke had just described as 'lovers of money.' Anything that we prize more than love of God, anything that blinds us to seeing and then serving our neighbor, is the stumbling block that will deny us the fullness of life in this world and the next. (This is also the only one of Jesus' parables with a scene set in the afterlife.) 
A powerful story I heard when I worked at Prudential in Newark has stayed with me. An executive traveled through Penn Station each day on his commute. One early evening his eye noticed a homeless man encamped in a corner near the escalator to the tracks. All the classic signs were there: poor grooming, a vacant stare, trash bags filled with possessions, a bit of a smell. My colleague hesitated in his dash to the meet his train, noticing something odd, something familiar in the man. He couldn't quite place it. His train was coming; he couldn't stay. But, as he told his wife later, "He looked like me! He even had on the same linen dress shirt, the same color blue with the French cuffs! How could this be? Those shirts are special-ordered!" His wife knew the answer. In a confessional mode she told him that she had inadvertently dropped off in the GoodWill bin what she thought was the bag of clothing to be donated -- only to discover later in the week the mix up when she went to the laundry with what turned out to be only her bag of 'leftovers.' Linen shirts were already on their way to Newark.
My takeaway after several years of pondering: When we really choose to see, the homeless man, clothed in the linen of his human dignity, does look like us.  

So we must ask, who is waiting at the gate? Who is placing demands on our Christian discipleship --for presence, accompaniment, friendship, mercy, forgiveness, and yes, the generosity of our treasure? Pope Francis has warned us of the dangers of comfortable living and the 'gentrification of the heart' that can be its consequence. He has called us to 'take off the blinders of cool indifference.' As Jesus portrays him, the rich man was neither cruel nor vicious as he entered his gated community each day, only oblivious, coolly indifferent, to the human person so near and yet so far. How can we overcome our cool hearts? Will we respond with the intentionality of Bishop O'Connell?