Sunday July 9, 2023
Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9-13; Matthew 11:25-30
Last Saturday Barb and I went down to the farmer’s market and met our son, Tim, and his family: our daughter-in-law, Crista; our almost three-year-old grandson, Hank; and our new granddaughter, Emmy Margaret, who was born just three weeks ago. Crista was carrying Emmy in a sling against her chest. All you could see was her beautiful little face. And the sun was shining, and the farmers were selling blueberries and raspberries, and there were people and dogs everywhere. A band was playing: two guitars, a clarinet, and a kazoo.
When St. Paul tells us not to live “according to the flesh,” he isn’t talking about the farmer’s market. He’s talking about all the mornings and the moments we’ve corrupted with our selfishness and our greed. He’s talking about the fallen body. How can blueberries be anything other than good when God made them in their sweetness and made us to taste them? How can even labradoodles be anything other than good, when as Zechariah says today, our king comes riding towards us on “a colt, the foal of an ass”? To live by the Spirit means to love this Spirit-filled world, and to learn how to see it the way a child sees it, with openness and joy, because it’s through the world, through what we can touch and taste and feel, that the Spirit reaches out to us.
“My dear souls,” Jean Pierre de Caussade says, “you are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: making use of whatever he offers you.” De Caussade was an eighteenth- century French Jesuit. “Everything leads you to union with God,” he says. “The blood flowing through your veins moves only by his will. Every feeling and every thought you have, no matter how they arise, all come from God’s invisible hand.” We have nothing to do, as de Caussade puts it, “but love and cherish what each moment brings.”
We think that prayer is too hard. We think that to try to be holy means to spend our lives on our knees or in the clouds, despising everything that is warm and ordinary and real. But that’s not what Jesus teaches. “Come to me,” he says, “all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest.” “For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”
How can our Lord despise the world when he came into it? How can he disdain the ordinary and the real when he lived it, when he came to the markets and walked through the fields and called the children unto him?
We are all dualists. Dualism is hammered into us from birth by the ideas we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment, from the age of de Caussade, the idea that what is real is only what can be measured, the idea that the inner life is not as important as the outer life. But Jesus says no. The truth has been hidden from “the wise and the learned” and “revealed to the little ones,” and so we have to be little, too. Humble. Ordinary. Small. We have stop getting lost in theological abstractions, however important theology is; we have to stop getting caught up in doctrinal disputes, however important doctrine is; we have to stop getting tricked into political debates disguised as discussions of faith, because debates like this are never anything but a waste of spirit.
There’s a new book by a contemporary Jesuit, James Martin, called Learning to Pray. One of the early chapters is called “Praying Without Knowing It,” and I love that, because we all pray at certain moments in our lives, as Martin says, instinctively, unconsciously, in moments of gratitude and joy, in moments of sorrow, and the reason to pray in more formal ways is to train our hearts to know this and see this. The rest of the book is full of good, clear descriptions of the various methods the tradition gives us—lectio divina, the examen, the rosary, centering prayer, and all the others—but these aren’t meant to take us away from our lives but to bring us back into them more deeply. It’s what the mass does most of all. In the consecration of the bread and wine we are being taught to believe in the fundamental fact of the Incarnation, of God incarnate, here, not far above us, but here, in all that is good and healthy and right.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to quote a third Jesuit, the great nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Generations have trod and trod,” for centuries beauty has been trampled down, “but there lives a dearest freshness deep down things,” Hopkins says, and he wants us to see that and feel that, because he believes that this what the Lord came to teach us. I’m walking past the booths at the farmers’ market. I meet a young colleague I haven’t seen since I retired, and I’m glad to see him again. He’s a good man. I look at all the people as they walk by, all the children and the parents and the grandparents. “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,” Hopkins says in another poem, “lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, / to the father through the features of men’s faces.”
In a journal entry Hopkins talks about all this in theological terms, about what he calls the “incredible condescension of the Incarnation,” “that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion . . . but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.” He through whom all things were made lets himself be trained as a carpenter. The Divine Reason, the Logos, lets himself be lectured to by the rabbis. Why is it so surprising, then, Hopkins asks, that our “reception” of his graces should also take place among ordinary things?
The blueberries are a foretaste of his grace, and the children, and the light, everything, of a beauty revealed for us fully in the Eucharist, which in turn feeds and strengthens us and moves us to read the world differently, to see past its surfaces to what is shining through them. How can blueberries be anything but good when in just a moment the Lord will once again give himself to us in a piece of bread, a little piece of ordinary bread, here and now, for all of us, we who are just living our lives and doing the best we can?