What scandalized the ancient Christians
wasn’t the idea that Jesus was divine
but the idea that he was human.
The Varied Thrush, in spring:
like someone who can’t whistle
whistling.
The Great Horned Owl, in the tree
by the mailbox:
like a man blowing on a beer bottle.
A tall man, with a hat.
O Lord, when I think of the galaxies and the stars, I am afraid.
“I have said these things to you,” Jesus tells his disciples, “so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
But this is the night before the crucifixion, this is the Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John, and sadness fills the room. Fear.
How can joy be possible?
In the beginning of John Jesus says we must be “born again,” but now he changes the image. He says, “when a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.”
And so, “you have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
Not birth: labor. Not a child anymore. The mother.
No one is happy yet, Goff says, but then he makes a distinction between “the banality of happiness” and the spiritual condition of “joy.”
The Reverend Norvel Goff, Sr. climbs into the pulpit of Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a few months before a gunman walked through the door and killed nine people sitting in a prayer circle. They had been studying the Parable of the Sower. A grandmother. A little girl. The pastor was one of those killed—Goff is taking his place—and he stands now in the pulpit and begins to preach.
“Many have asked, ‘How are you? How is Mother Emanuel?’ he says. “My response is: ‘With your prayers and encouragement and with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.”
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.
A reflection from my recent Rome pilgrimage.
The building that houses the rooms of St. Ignatius, in Rome, where he lived the last years of his life, is adjacent to the great Jesuit church Gesu.
The rooms are wonderfully spare, with whitewashed walls and stone floors and low, wood-beamed ceilings. When you walk upstairs you see the simple wooden desk where Ignatius wrote and the simple wooden chair where he sat. Light comes through small, latticed windows.
Gesu is completely different. You walk in and the Baroque is exploding everywhere, angels and saints and colors and clouds billowing and rising all the way to the great dome in the center, every surface emblazoned and curlicued.
But here’s what a guidebook says, and I think it’s completely wrong: that Ignatius would have been “embarrassed” by Gesu. By the contrast.
As if our own taste has to be everybody’s.
As if it’s not possible for a person to like more than one kind of thing.
Lord of all ordinariness, Lord of all miracle, transform us, transfigure us, make us your own!
February is the shortest month of course but to me it always feels like the longest. It’s still winter but I can’t wait for spring. One gray day follows another. Everything is ragged and muddy and tired.
And my big temptation in moments like this is to start eating, especially sweet things, or to collapse on the couch and watch TV all day, especially something with spaceships, or to go online and start buying things, especially shiny things. I don’t want to face reality. I don’t want to face myself.
I don’t want to face reality. I don’t want to face myself.
I think what’s amazing about Jesus in the temptation in the wilderness in last week’s readings is how willing he is to accept how boring life can be. The devil is really saying, let’s do something exciting, let’s distract ourselves from this ordinary reality, and Jesus can, of course. He’s God himself, full of power and miraculous potential. Why not just go ahead and zap something, turn a rock into a loaf of bread, if only to relieve the tedium?
But Jesus knows that miracles are not the point. However many rocks get turned into loaves, you still have to face your own limitations and needs, you still have to act with compassion, you still have to get up in the morning and go to work.
We are each given a mission, we are each given a task, and none is more important than any other.
I like it when Ordinary Time starts again. When we put away the Christmas things and the days slowly get longer and I go back to teaching and back into my routine. I like going back to my nets: sitting and mending them and then going out onto the water to fish and make a living. This is what I do, what we do.
I wonder about the fisherman Jesus didn’t call that day. Maybe they were paying attention and maybe they were ready to follow him. Maybe they heard the message, too, or felt the transforming power of this person as he went walking by, but they weren’t chosen to be disciples in that way. They were chosen to remain fishermen, to mend their nets and live their lives.
We are each given a mission, we are each given a task, and none is more important than any other. The fishermen who stayed behind were not less holy than Simon and Andrew and James and John. We know from the rest of the gospel how bumbling and uncertain and erratic those men could be, just as we can be bumbling and uncertain ourselves. We know how when we’re fishing or at night when we come home we have moments of joy and insight, and opportunities to act with kindness and justice, or not.
The fishermen who remained behind, if they were living their lives fully and honestly, and praying, and paying attention, they were following Jesus, too. We all have our nets, and we can get entangled in them or we can lower them for the catch and we can feed others.
We all have our nets, and we can get entangled in them or we can lower them for the catch and we can feed others.
Today, Lord, as we go about our work, as we go about our lives, may we do your will and follow where you lead and may we believe we are doing your will and we are following you, even in the most ordinary of our tasks, even in the most ordinary work we do. For you are with us always. You are always calling us: deeper and deeper into the ordinary mystery of things.
I was at a meeting the other day with some people from the community, good, committed people. But we were talking about holding an event and where it should be, and the argument was being made–it was really being made–that we shouldn’t hold this event in a church because a lot of people find the idea of God offensive and see the church as a sign of political oppression.
Christ as a sign of oppression? What?
I was really upset by this.
I was upset in part because of the assumption that faith is a matter of personal opinion and what we like and don’t like when for us Jesus isn’t an opinion and Jesus isn’t whatever we want Him to be. He is the truth. He came into the world to “testify to the truth,” as he tells Pilate today. We may not like kings, but too bad. Jesus is the king, a real king, of all majesty and greatness and power.
It’s like going to the Grand Canyon and saying, I don’t like things that deep. It’s like going to see Van Gogh’s Starry Night and saying, I don’t like things that beautiful. Too bad. Some things are grand and some things are beautiful and some things overpower us, rightly, and Jesus is all that and more, far more, and it doesn’t matter what we think of him, as C.S. Lewis once said: it matters what He thinks of us.
