Homily thoughts: Tuesday, 27OT - Martha, Mary, and cattle wearing sack-cloth

   One of the ironies of being a priest, or perhaps, one of the ironies of me being a priest is to find myself standing in front of a congregation of faced with the task of saying something intelligent about the scriptures that are in front of me on any given day.  I know them, or that is to say, I have read them and I am familiar with what they say, and have some inkling of what they mean, but sometimes I really don't understand them in such a way that they have become and part of who I am and what I can offer when I stand in the well to preach.  As many with this ministry will attest, often as the preacher I am in greatest need of preaching, myself.

   Today's scripture passages are a perfect example of this: Martha and Mary.  "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.  There is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her" (Luke 10: 41-42).  There hasn't been a spiritual director created by the hand of God that has not come after me, inviting me to reflect more deeply upon this passage.  Yeah, I understand what is going on here, and I have a taste of Martha's desire, Mary's rest, and Jesus' invitation, but it just has not part of me and my lived experience.... yet.  Not that I give up hope in receiving such grace and wisdom, but I just have not seen myself through to embracing the thoroughgoing rest that the Lord offers her and offers me.  On the mornings I see this particular reading facing me on the right-hand page of the Lectionary, I am delighted to turn to the left side and see a reading as delightful as this morning's.  I think in my eight years of priesthood, on the Tuesday of the 27th week of Ordinary Time, I have always chosen to muse on the image of struggling Jonah's mission to call Nineveh to repentance as being so successful that even the cattle and livestock ended up wearing sackcloth and ashes (Jonah 3:8)!  It simply tickles my funny bone, which as many who know me can attest, likes to be amused.

   But this morning Martha and Mary faced me on the right side of the book, and I waded into this passage, perhaps as an explorer opening new territory for the first time.  My conversion has come about at the hands of having lots of time on my hands over the last year, true.  I can't say that I made as much of that time as I could have, but that already misses the point, doesn't it?  "Mary has chosen the better part..." to rest at my side and take in my presence, "... and it will not be taken from her."

   I am as guilty as anyone might be in living my life by the catchy idea that "there will be time to rest when I am dead" (a quote from Ben Franklin).  Or, even more seductively, "work as it if all depends on you, pray as if it all depends on God," effectively separating work from contemplation... or maybe simply corrupting contemplation with work.  (Many attribute this quote to Augustine, but I don't have the reference... I don't want to pick a fight with the great teacher of Christian doctrine if he said it, but wow, it is easy to corrupt this maxim.)  I also like the image that comes from the Jesuits of striving to be be an "active-contemplative", but I know I'd screw that up as well.  Even, at times, what passes as simple prayer becomes infected by a sense of obligation to be 'doing', rather than simply and joyfully 'being'.  I suppose that early on-from my parents, and certainly from my early school teachers--through no fault of their own, as they desire what was best as an antidote to my own manifest desires to be distracted by frivolity--I have been indoctrinated with the ideal that time is not to be wasted, but used with utmost care and attention.  Time is, after all, the only non-renewable resource we have to better our lives and we must make the most of it.  Yes, all of this is true, but does the endless activity we use to fill our time, in reality, actually make us better?

   None other than Fr. Robert Barron, through his Word on Fire ministry, has helped me progress in a deeper understanding of this passage.  From one of his homilies or videos or writings--I don't remember where--put me on to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and his Pensées.  Duitifully I looked up the passages about divertissment... the diversions, distractions that we embrace and enjoy and count on to remove ourselves from the most "insufferable" anguish we encounter... to be completely and totally at rest... not just sleeping, or loafing, or being taken up by the myriad of distractions that we have in our contemporary world like Internet surfing, watching TV, or taking up basketweaving, but to be totally at rest.  "...to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without study.  He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness" (#131)  "...the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely" (139).

   Pascal takes us to the absurdity of our struggle to be distracted by considering the life of the king.  Unlike wining any lottery, unlike being rich beyond imagining, there is nothing more distracting than being the king of the realm.  "The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self" (139).  Jesters, cooks, courtiers, chauffers, generals, and the Queen. Supplicants, synchophants, assasins, and mauraders.  Butlers, advisors, wise men, and stewards.  Subjects, vassals, nobility, and clerics.  All of these people arrayed around the king provide endless distractions.  In our modern/post-modern age, is it not enough to consider that what is good enough for the king is good enough for all of us too?

To bid man to live quietly is to bid him live happily.  It is to advise him to be in a state perfectly happy, in which he can think at leisure without finding therein a cause of distress.  This is to misunderstand nature.  As men who naturally understand their own condition avoid nothing so much as rest, so there is nothing they leave undone in seeking turmoil.  Not that they have an instinctive knowledge of truehappiness... So we are wrong in blaming them.  Their eror does not lie in seeking excitement, if they seek it only as a diversion; the evil is that they seek it as if the posession of objects of their quest would make them really happy. (139)

    And so, "let us leave a king alone to reflect upon himself quiet at leisure, without any gratification of the sense, without any care in his mind, without society; and we will see that a king without diversion is a man full of wrechedness.  So this is carefully avoided, and near the persons of kings there never fail to be a great number of people who see ito it that amusement follows business, and who watch all the time of their leasure to supply them with delights and games, so that there is no blank in it." (142).  This can easily become the life of the diocesan priest (and I suppose religious) as well... by the accident of our good work, if not by design. 

   Fr. Ed Oakes, whom I am proud to call a teacher and mentor, offers an absolute tour de force review of the work of Pascal in First Things (Aug-Sept 1999).  Oakes opines, rightly, that Pascal was the "first modern Christian", that is, the first Chrsitian thinker who engages the subjectivism of Descartes which spawned the great re-awakening of Europe and the world... not that Pascal sought to put the world back to sleep, but to show it how to truly rest in the Lord.  He explains that the desire for distraction in the king, yea for all of us, is nothing less than the driving force, "so overriding and exigent," of ambition.  "... our extraordinary obsession with entertainment and distraction constitutes perhaps the hallmark of our civilization in contrast to past cultures.  From the time the clock radio goes off in the morning to late-night talk shows, the average denizen of contemporary culture need never be alone, encounter silence, or have to listen to the voice within."  But isn't ambition that Pascal and Oaks talks about simply desire for riches, fame, fortune, success, and admiration?  Sure, it can look like a big house and two cars for some, that promotion at work, a private island in the South Pacific, raising successful children, the respect of a larger paycheck, besting the neighbor, an extra stripe on a uniform sleeve, the title of 'doctor', and for some it can even look like a ring and miter.  But the greatest threat is that ambition alienates us from our families, from our friends, from God, and even from our very selves.  Yes, Fr. Oakes is right about that 'diving and exigent' force.  Ambition, when unmasked, can be nothing less than the deepest form of distraction in and of itself, twisted together with pride, that we risk enduring.

      So... 

Faced with the choice to muse in the cattle wearing sack cloth and revel in Jonah's missionary success, or to engage the Martha-Mary story, for probably the first time this morning, I find myself wading into what has been a losing battle for so much of my life.  But this is a very different battle now.  Rather than running up to it, singing the lyrics to "I am the very model of a modern major-general", I now wear the armor of Pascal.  I am very aware that the cleverness of these insights can easily disguise themselves as true growth in holiness, but the battle has changed.  Maybe I simply know the enemy better?  But as I come to the altar today, I am drawn to the image of St. John who rests his head on the breast of our Lord.  I also note that the story of Martha and Mary does not end.  We don't know how Martha responds.  It is an open-ended question--perhaps an invitation to close the story with our own response to the Lord, as haltingly and tentatively as our activity-infected minds and hearts and bodies can offer and try.  The Eucharist we celebrate is nothing less than an extension of that invitation to "come away and rest awhile" by choosing the "better part".

  Another thought came to me, as I was trying to 'land the plane' and exit this homily (which is no where near as long or detailed as written here, but when the Holy Spirit speaks...)  I seek to live as St. John.  I seek to live as Mary and to find rest as Martha.  As the first tinges of light begin illuminating the windows of the chapel just after 6 am today, I consider the physical fatigue which I and the sisters encounter every morning as we come to (ironically) the 'resting place' of the altar.  We fast our bodies from food in the hours before approaching the Sacred Banquet, that our physical state of hunger may illuminate the spiritual hunger that we all have for the Eucharist.  I am now considering that the fatigue of the early morning hour--before the distraction of caffiene and breakfast and the news and Facebook and the Internet and this blog posting--how our physical state informs and illuminates the deeper spiritual desire we all have for rest... true rest, not just sleep.  I and many of my priest colleagues (not to mention many of the sisters here) can attest to this struggle, but never have I considered that it is a new and different kind of "fast", for a new and different kind of purpose as I come to the altar... a "fast" from sleep to find true spiritual rest.  I am hardly perfected in this discipline either, but it has a new spiritual meaning that weighs upon me as I consider Martha and Mary and Jesus. 

   It is ironic... humbling, actually... to be handed the scriptures every day, with the responsibilty of making some kind of sense of them, when I so slightly know the deepest meaning that lies at the heart of its revelation.  I imagine that I will have to embrace that inadequacy for the rest of my life, but I admit that not in defeat, but in resignation to the plans of the Lord to form me and prepare me for what will truly heal and save my soul.  Someday I pray to receive the gift of his eternal peace and rest in a way that the world cannot give, descending into the green valley, near peaceful waters, as he leads with crook and staff out of the valley of darkness and storms and monsters and bills and calendars and shame and death.  And so I preach as one who often squirms, turning over in bed and repositioning the pillow and shuffling under the blankets to try to get comfortable enough to drift off into sleep.  But moreso, it is a spiritual rest and attentiveness that I long for... and preach about today.  It is the rest that many of us look for, but cannot even express.  I ask your prayers and consideration and promise them to you--all who seek--as I also continue to seek, and hopefully find.  I invite you to join me in accepting, as best we can, the Lord's own invitation to rest here at the altar today.

 

P.S.: There are few creative activities in the world as amazing as preaching... references to Gilbert and Sullivan, First Things, sackcloth-wearing livestock, Ben Franklin, Blaise Pascal, and Mel Brooks, Fr. Barron and Fr. Oakes, catholicmemes.com, great (and not-so-great) artwork, and the Tradition itself... all conspiring with each other (perhaps unbeknownst to them) in service to the Gospel... and it all seems to make sense.  That creativity is so easy to be crushed under the heavy weight of pastoral ministry... I have a priviledged assignment at the moment where I can pray and reflect on the Word each day quite a bit more deeply than parish life tends to allow, and in a way, I think I am close to the absolute top of my game in the preaching ministry.  I beg you, readers, to please be considerate of the priests and deacons in your own parishes who soldier on as best they can under all the activities they are called on to do.  They need your encouragement and support and prayer.  Really.  It makes all the difference in the world.  Really.