We Are Not Worthy

But Jesus did not say a word in answer to her.  (Matthew 15:23)

The Canaanite woman was lucky: Jesus eventually did give her an answer, the same day that she asked.  But for so many people, God's silence seems to go on indefinitely - for years, for a lifetime.  Yet she persists in her faith, and insists on continuing to do him homage (15:25).

When Jesus does speak to the Canaanite woman, his first words to her are harsh and humiliating.  "I have not come for your kind," He says first.  Then He compares her to a dog!  But she is not to be deterred, or deferred.  Her faith is marked by her persistence, her insistence, her willingness to argue and even "talk back" to God.  She does not give up on God!  

Yet her insistence that God will and must act on her behalf does not come from a place of entitlement.  She accepts His judgment of her.  She is not worthy.  She even accepts His characterization of her as no more worthy than a "dog."  Her appeal to God rests not on her worthiness, but on God's generosity.  She comes to God in a stance of humility - but her humility will not be rebuffed.

It is to these people that God comes.  Not the people who feel entitled to special treatment, not the people who insist on their own worth, not the people who point to themselves in their appeal to God.  God comes for the people who recognize, deeply, their own unworthiness, but point rather to the worthiness and goodness and generosity and abundance of God.  It is these people who are able to be lifted out of their own narcissism and self-centeredness and who can recognize God as the source of all that is good.

God's silence at times is a way to bring us to this place of humility.  The truly humble person knows that God cannot and will not remain silent forever - not because she deserves an answer, but because God's goodness will prevail.

We do not live in a culture that values humility.  Certainly the virtue of humility has been warped in the past, to justify keeping certain groups of people silent, or to encourage people to endure injustice without fighting back.  Certainly it is good to fight back against this wrong notion of humility.  

But the Canaanite woman's example teaches us how humility actually is a call to speak out against suffering and injustice, and is the only starting point for seeking true righteousness.  There is an irony in this that many advocates of social justice seem - at least in their public proclamations - seem to miss.  It is only by a deep awareness of our own unworthiness that we can claim our true worth as sons and daughters of God.  It is only through humility that we can claim dignity.

The Shut Door

Alphonsus Liguori

When I was growing up my parents were fond of the saying, There are no atheists in foxholes, but even at a young age I sensed the illogic of such a statement.  It's far easier to believe in God when life is going well than it is when life challenges you.

In fact as a believer I think that's why God challenges you.  He wants you to have a mature faith, one that can withstand tests and difficulties.  One that causes us to raise our voices with the Psalmist: My courage fails me. . . [but] though I am afflicted and poor, my Lord keeps me in mind (Psalm 40).  

I have always found myself closer to God in good times than in bad.  But I know that this sense of distance is my own doing.  I have voluntarily chosen to shut myself off from God.  I am angry with Him.  I do not want Him near.  I don't want to accept the consolation - perhaps even the apology! - He wants to offer me.  

I don't want to trust Him.

I thank God for giving me the space to sit quietly and lick my wounds.  I know that even if I've locked the door on Him, He's still waiting patiently outside.  Sometimes I can even sense myself opening the door a crack, and in those moments I can hear Him whispering to me the words I know are true but that I don't want to believe, because it's easier not to believe.  So I slam the door shut again.  It's easier to whine and moan, Why me? than it is to accept that God will give me the courage to face whatever it is I have been called to face.  Because I don't want to face it.

God is being patient with me.  I thank Him for that.  Even as I know I've put this distance between us - even as I know I'm being as immature and quarrelsome as an adolescent who feels deprived unjustly of some unearned privilege - I know He still loves me, and will wait for me to open the door to Him once more.

I do want to open the door.  Underneath my anger, I still love Him.  And I can only cast myself on my reliance that He will continue to bestow upon me His loving kindness.

Reflections on Pentecost

We speak of Pentecost as God's dramatic reversal of the Babel event.

At Babel, those building the tower thought that they could reach heaven through their own efforts.  They thought they could enter heaven without the help of God.  But their pride, which inspired them to build their tower, ironically was the root of their downfall.  Prideful men refuse to listen, refuse to hear.  Prideful men cannot communicate with one another.  Prideful men seek power over other men, insisting that they are "better" than others even within their own group.  A prideful people cannot remain united for long.

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit achieved something remarkable: He used the very vices that drove the people of Babel apart - their differences of opinion, their inability to listen to one another - and transformed them into a means of forging a new unity.  Difference, instead of being divisive, is chastened and sanctified by the Holy Spirit and becomes a path to reconciliation.  Diversity is graced, and brings people together.

It is because of the Holy Spirit that we can celebrate diversity as a positive good, that we can find unity among the differences that bind us.  Of course, we must choose whether or not we will respond to the Spirit's graced transformation of difference.  Difference now has the potential to unite us, but unless we open our hearts to the Spirit's workings our differences will continue to divide us.  It is up to us to make the potential of unity-through-difference a concrete reality in the world.

The Second Reading from Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians contains an image of the many diverse gifts given by the Spirit, reflecting the Spirit's opening the doors to unity through diversity.  Paul addresses a community whose pride threatened to divide, much like the pride that threatened the people of Babel.  The Corinthians were arguing over whose spiritual gifts were the "best," like servants in God's household jockeying for position and squabbling over who was most important.  Paul tries to impress upon them the unity that comes from being children of the same Spirit - children as we all are, since Pentecost.  We are all different, and we are all essential.  Accept humbly the gifts you've been given, and rejoice humbly at the gifts given to others.

This is so very hard to do.  It is so easy to be jealous when others seem to have things you want.  It's easy to accuse God of injustice when someone else's life is going better than your own.  But we know how these prideful jealousies can rip relationships apart.  Accepting God's Spirit means accepting each day, for good or bad, as God's gift to you.  It means accepting the things that happen to you, good or bad, as an opportunity to grow in grace.  It means accepting the path God has given you for your salvation - rather than coveting someone else's path, or trying to create a path of your own.

Pentecost teaches us that by the grace of the Spirit God can transform an ostensibly evil situation into something good.  It can be hard to believe that God can do this in our own lives. but this is precisely what Pentecost asks us to believe.  When things don't go "your way," when life seems unfair - even and especially when you feel you are trying your best to be "good" and serve God! - you must trust God to bring grace out of change of course that has been thrown before you.  Remember that you can serve God in life no matter what path He has given you to follow.  After all, serving God the way He asks us to serve Him - which isn't always the way we wish to serve Him - is the goal of our Christian lives.

This is essential not just for our own happiness; it is also essential for the unity of our families, our communities, and our Church.  Resentment, jealousy, covetousness, and pride have no place in the Church.  Insisting on doing things "our way" instead of truly listening to each other - and to God - will lead only to ruin.  We are all different.  We have different lives, different opinions, different viewpoints, different experiences, different perspectives.   That is not something God has changed or wishes to change.  But it is up to us to use our differences wisely, for the good of all.  Accept the way in which you are different and celebrate it, without insisting that your way of being different is better or holier than anyone else's, and without being envious of others' gifts.  Accept the challenges that you encounter as a result of your differences as part of your journey to God.  This is how we can truly live the spirit of Pentecost.  

Day 48: Spiritual and Religious

I have little patience with confessors who try to convince penitents not to feel bad because what they’ve done isn’t really a sin.  In making such comments they think they are offering comfort, but truly I feel that they are denying their penitents the experience of God’s forgiveness and mercy, which is far greater comfort than any false sense of our own innocence can give.

I do not understand the distinction between spiritual and religious.  For me religion has always been the mode of accessing the spiritual – that is what religion is about.  But without the support of religion, spirituality becomes paralyzed, like an engine with no car to run. 

I think when people try to access the spiritual without the structure of religion, the spiritual simply becomes therapeutic, serving only our need to feel good about ourselves, even if this “good feeling” does happen to include a sense of communion with and love for others. 

Religion, however, reminds us that the spiritual also entails real, concrete, and often difficult obligations to others and to God: obligations to be at a certain place at a certain time, obligations to behave in a certain way towards others, even an obligation to ourselves – to go to church even when we don’t feel like it, to feed our souls even when we don’t feel like eating. 

Spirituality turns us inward and lifts our souls to heaven; religion grounds the spiritual and reminds us of our responsibilities here on earth.  Religion without spirituality is dead, but spirituality without religion is impotent.

Day 47: A Sacrament of Poverty

The Eucharist is the sacrament of poverty.  Mother Teresa writes: The Eucharist and the poor are nothing more than the same love of God.  The Eucharist is God impoverished, stripped of the trappings of divinity and made into a piece of bread.  A piece of bread!  The cheapest, simplest, most basic, most common, and yet most insignificant type of food.  Not content to divest Himself of His power and become merely human, Christ humbled Himself even more and became a piece of bread to nourish humans.  Can we truly understand what it means that Christ became bread?  

If we can see Christ in a piece of bread, then why can we not see Him in the poor - who, after all, are at least human beings created in God's image!  If we see that Christ humbled Himself to give Himself as nourishment to others, then why do we not follow His example and give our whole lives in nourishing other people?

When we receive the Eucharist we are receiving poverty.  Even if we do not understand it, we are, in the act of eating Christ impoverished as a piece of bread, expressing solidarity with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the lonely, the elderly - all the poor who live their lives unrecognized as Christ among us, just as to faithless eyes the Eucharist appears only as a piece of bread.

Seeing with the eyes of faith means more than seeing Christ in a piece of bread.  It also means seeing Christ in the most debased, the most filthy, the most impoverished, the ugliest of human conditions.  

That is why Christ coupled the Last Supper with the washing of feet, something only the lowest of servants would do.  Christ is calling us both to see Him in those who serve us, and He is calling us to imitate Him in His poverty.  He is calling us to recognize that the poor are our servants and that we must let them serve us by serving them.  Mother Teresa also writes that the poor have given her far more than she gives them.  But she could only receive what they had to give by first giving herself to them.

What is beautiful about Mother Teresa is her recognition that spiritual poverty is worse than material poverty.  By spiritual poverty she means: loneliness, a sense of worthlessness, a sense that you no longer have anything to offer the world.  The great crime of material poverty is that it so often leads to spiritual poverty, especially when we live in a society that tells us the poor are mere "leeches," the mentally ill are to be feared and shunned, the homeless and unemployed are simply "lazy," and so on.  We do not see the poor as people who have things to offer us.  And so we ignore them, and we plunge them into spiritual poverty.

When Mother Teresa offered rice to a poor woman with eight children, the woman took half the rice and went to share it with another poor family who was hungry.  Mother Teresa says: "I did not bring them more rice that night because I wanted them to experience the joy of loving and sharing."  Mother Teresa recognized that it was vitally important to that poor woman to experience herself as someone who had something to offer someone else.

It is not your money that will save the poor.  It is your love.

Mother Teresa is clear that love was not given to us to make us "feel good."  Love, if it is true, is supposed to hurt.  We are called to turn each act of love into an act of suffering service, and we are called to turn each act of suffering into an act of love.

Days 38-46: Wisdom through Suffering

Augustine says that a philosopher is not a man who is wise but a man who loves wisdom. 

Ambrose says that we believe fishermen, not dialecticians.

The fishermen whom we believe are philosophers in the truest sense of the word, because they loved wisdom, and they recognized it when they saw it, or rather when they saw Him.

The problem with so many philosophers today is that they become dialecticians, in love with their own arguments and ideas.  They no longer have the humility to love wisdom itself, because love of wisdom entails the acknowledgement that there are things you will never understand.

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What is the value of fasting?  I think of the female medieval mystics, who were known both for their great charity, and for their great fasts.  How do they fit together?

Our Church teaches that we are all “in this” together.  We rejoice when others rejoice; we mourn when others mourn.  As part of one Body, if one member suffers we all suffer. 

Members of our body are hungry now.   They are poor, naked, homeless, sick, cold.  When we fast – whether from food or from other material comforts – we manifest in our own lives the truth that the hunger and the suffering of the poor are also our hunger and our suffering.  This is the meaning of solidarity. 

When I suffer the hunger and deprivation of the fast that I have chosen, I should be remembering the ones who have no choice but to suffer hunger and deprivation.  The pang in my flesh should make present to me the obligations I have to those who suffer out of necessity. 

As long as other members of Christ’s body are suffering, so too am I suffering, whether I realize it or not.  The choice to fast is my choice to realize it and to live out this realization.

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When we confront suffering, we have a choice.  We can choose to turn inward, towards selfishness, towards hopelessness, towards hatred.  Or we can choose to confront it with an attitude of love, hope, faith.  We can choose to make it into something that transforms us into a gift given up for others. 

God has made this choice possible by offering Himself on the Cross.  But He does not excuse us from the responsibility of choosing.

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I read this recently: “We are always receiving God’s mercies.  Many of them we don’t understand – some are painful, some are unbearable – but they are all God’s mercies.  We just ask that He please give us a few more of the tender ones.”

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Cardinal Carlos Maria Martini, S.J., writes that Peter’s problem was that he wanted to be the Lord’s savior.  How much insight does that give into Peter’s personality throughout the Gospels!  He was a man of action, and he wanted very much to be doing something for the Lord.  Build a tent, wash feet, fight, die.  We find Christ throughout gently rebuking him.  It is my job to serve you, Christ says.  It is my job to save you.  Let me save you, for you cannot save yourself, and you certainly cannot save me.  Peter becomes wise only when he acknowledges that his ability to serve the Lord comes not from himself, but in fact from the Lord he wishes to serve.

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Thus the fisherman attains wisdom through suffering.  First, suffering the wounds to his pride: realizing he cannot save Christ, realizing that all the ways he had thought to fight for what was right had failed, and realizing that he could not even trust himself to be loyal to his dearest friend.  Then, suffering on account of love: enduring hardship for the sake of the One who saved him.  The first kind of suffering brings grief; the second brings joy.

I think Christ acknowledges the grief that accompanies death to self, and I think He understands our need to mourn this death.  When Peter heard the cock crow, he wept.  There is no escaping the wounding of our ego, the recognition of our dependence on others, the acknowledgment that we cannot control our circumstances or even wholly understand ourselves.  

But then Christ calls us to transform this death to self into self-gift of love.  Don't languish in the mourning of your own incompetency.  Christ has taken your inadequacy and transformed it into Himself.  He has saved you, and if you give your wounded pride to Him He can restore you.  Die to self, and Christ can live in you, and in Christ's life in you you will find joy.

Day 37: Neither Do I Condemn

All sin is akin to adultery, because it all involves taking what rightfully belongs to God and giving it to other 'gods.'  All sin is breaking covenant with God.

Thus when Jesus forgives the adulteress in John 8, He is really forgiving all of us.  We stand with that adulteress, who has given herself to men who are not her covenanted spouse.

Of course He is also telling the scribes and Pharisees that they are adulterers, like the woman they are prepared to stone.  But He is also offering them forgiveness, just as He offers the adulteress forgiveness.  In forgiving the adulteress, He forgives us all.

He is the only one who has the right to throw a stone, for He is the sinless one.  He, after all, is the cuckold.  Hear God's cry of rage against His faithless spouse in Ezekiel 15.  But in Christ this rage has gone: all that is left is compassion and mercy.  The cuckold does not abandon His adulterous wife.  Neither do I condemn you. . . It is a moment of reconciliation.  Christ is fulfilling God's promise to "remember the covenant He has made" and to "make atonement" for all His faithless wife has done.  It is in accordance with this remembrance of His mercy that Christ declares the woman innocent of her crime.  He is not simply declaring this woman innocent; He is declaring His people innocent.

This Gospel is paired with the story of Susanna in the Book of Daniel.  Susanna is innocent, unlike the woman in John's Gospel. But remember: in John's Gospel Jesus' words pronounce the adulteress innocent despite her guilt.  In both tales, innocent blood is spared.  Susanna is innocent of wrongdoing according to the Law, but the adulteress is innocent because of Christ's gracious action on her behalf.  

The fact that the elders in Susanna's story are the ones who are truly guilty - the true adulterers - underscores Jesus' implication about the scribes' and Pharisees' unfaithfulness.  The desire of the scribes and Pharisees to find a trumped-up charge to bring against Jesus also parallels the perjury of the elders in Susanna's case.  The point is clear: when we pass judgment on and condemn others, we perjure ourselves.  Because in the act of judging others, we imply that we are innocent - that we are "sinless" - when we are not.  We are all complicit in each other's crimes.

When we judge others, we second-guess the God who has refused to condemn them.  We put our judgments before God's.  One of the worst sins is smug self-righteousness.  Such self-righteousness can be found both in those who moralize and impose their codes of behavior on others, and in those who take refuge in God's promise of forgiveness as an excuse to persist in sinfulness.  The devil is at work in this, again using things that are good - moral judgment, trust in God's mercy - and turning them to his evil purposes.  The only cure is in humility: an awareness of ourselves as we truly are before God.  Only when we are humble will we have the clearness of vision to condemn the sin (both in ourselves and others) out of love for the sinner (both ourselves and others).