MATTHEW 6:19-23
A homily from my recent Rome pilgrimage.
When I saw the Porziuncola again, the little church within the church, inside the Basilica of St. Mary’s of the Angels, in Assisi—the simple stone hut that St. Francis built in the 12th century, with brick and stucco and mud, about the size of a one-car garage, and vaulting up all around it, marbled and high-ceilinged, still another great Italian church, a basilica, with all the usual arches and statues and bronze—I thought of the soul.
I thought of us.
We all have an inner innocence. We all have an inner goodness. But our pride engulfs it–our self-consciousness–all the elaborate architecture of our egos.
We have to throw off our finery, as St. Francis famously did. Not be afraid to be who really are.
I don’t mean that we have to be spiritual athletes, because we can’t be. Francis never expected his followers to observe his own austerities. He was always very gentle with others and accommodating of their frailties and their humanness, and in fact at the end of his too-short life he even expressed regret for the way he had abused his own body. I should have been kinder to poor “brother ass,” he said, speaking of his body, of himself. At the very end he asked a friend to make him the special kind of almond cake he loved.
We have to throw off our finery, as St. Francis famously did. Not be afraid to be who really are.
St. Francis wasn’t a puritan or a scold but more a clown, not just free of pretension but full of joy in the simple things of life.
You know how when you travel you worry about your clothes and about packing and what you will eat and where you will sleep and how you will get to where you are going? I do, and I think, I shouldn’t be thinking about these ordinary things. I should be thinking higher, spiritual thoughts.
But in the museum of the Basilica of St. Clare the relics set out behind the glass looked just like the contents of our own suitcases: the shoes of St. Francis. The habit of St. Clare.
The spiritual life is a life, it’s ordinary, it’s a matter of simple things and bodily acts and living together day to day. I think that our own Porziuncola is made up of our ordinary human needs, our eating and our sleeping and our getting around, and that we should just admit this and not pretend otherwise—not keep spinning out complicated theological abstractions and using big words all the time, as if we’re not just everyone else.
What does Jesus say on the cross? I thirst.
And maybe this is the really spiritual thing about going on pilgrimage, the way it leaves us vulnerable and reminds us of our humanness.
The spiritual life is a life, it’s ordinary, it’s a matter of simple things and bodily acts and living together day to day.
Maybe whenever we hunger or thirst or are tired, we should just stand back and see this and admit this and laugh at ourselves, affectionately. Say, hello Brother Ass. Maybe we should stand back and admit how radically dependent we always are on the kindness and competence of others and how radically dependent we are most of all on Jesus Christ, the one who satisfies our deepest thirst, the one who answers our every hunger and our every need, who in the Eucharist and in every moment, in everything we see and do, in Corvallis or Assisi, Spokane or Siena, is giving himself away to us, feeding us who he really is, human and divine, both, equally, the one in the other.