Are you having trouble with someone, or some group, right now? Most of us have at least one angry moment a day, but usually those moments pass without our cutting someone out of our life. Angry moments come, but they pass quickly enough, usually. Today’s readings don’t really address the normal, run-of-the-mill angers and frustrations of life–other readings do that, but not these.
These readings are all about living charitably with the people we’d really like to “cut out of our life,” out of our dialogue, and, if possible, never have to see or hear from them again. Holidays can create such tensions in families if we aren’t emotionally vigilant. And we have one coming up at Labor Day. Families get together, they have a few drinks, and when the “guards” are down, the claws can come out. Children can hear gossip about relatives that they shouldn’t have to hear, for most of it is “packaged” information, to make whoever we’re “on the outs with” look bad while making us look saintly. People, let’s face it! Everyone in this room is loved by God, and everyone in this room is trying to be a decent person, BUT no one has proposed our canonization YET! What we say to and about each other can “poison” the minds of the young, and poison our earth in the process.
And, just as family holidays can create “trainwrecks of hatred and mistrust” for individuals, so can election years exacerbate national divisions for a nation, creating vicious speech and downright dishonesty instead of a common search for the good of the country and the entire earth. And we are in an election year. We are going to hear the dumbest things said about both the current candidates and their possible running mates. We will hear horrible things that shouldn’t be said about anyone, things that both parties know are not really true...but information is packaged in such a way that a candidate and the running mate look somewhere on the gamut between foolish or naive, and absolutely evil.
Just like families need to approach holidays with Emotional Vigilance, we all need to approach our national issues with Emotional Vigilance, too, or we end up hating the people sitting next to us, when what everyone wants is merely something good for the country. We don’t disagree on goals, only strategies to achieve those goals.
How fortuitous that as we are returning from vacations, and getting ready to start up school year routines, again, and the regular round of committees and meetings, that we have THESE readings to set a tone and guide us into the fall. The readings beg and PLEAD for Emotional Vigilance, for a deep care about how we use words, how we talk about people we have fundamental disagreements with. The readings do NOT call for obscuring our differences with others, but they DO call for Emotional Vigilance in approaching those issues and people. For people are not, according to the Scriptures, “evil”–no matter how misguided we think their opinions may be. They, too, have hopes and dreams of greatness, dignity and worth. There has to be room for difference, or whatever we are standing for isn’t worth the effort we are putting into standing for it.
In the first reading a poet of the soul who has lived through a living hell of being marched off across 600 miles of desert to slavery in Babylon, and who has seen his royal family tortured and slaughtered, and who has seen the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the entire nation of Judah, can say to his fellow-sufferers: “These foreigners CAN BE JOINED to the Lord, and in doing so, IF WE ARE BIG ENOUGH, EMOTIONALLY, we can create a “house of prayer for all peoples.” In other words, an avenue of unity with each other and with God CAN BE built as we build good faith with those we have always thought of as “enemies.” If we can learn to see them differently, to name them differently, we can change the world!
Paul, in Romans is writing to Gentiles who are NOT getting along with the Jews of Rome. Paul has told them that they are “grafted into the olive tree” that is Israel, and are acceptable to God, but “ISRAEL” doesn’t want to have much to do with them! And tensions are brewing faster than bubbles appear in boiling water! And Paul says to them, “You know, you’re not better than they are...get that out of your heads.......they may not “see” what God is up to, but that’s between God and them!....YOU BE NICE! In other words, the Gentiles needed to learn to see the Jews as the Jews saw themselves, and respect that. THEN, dialogue can begin. It can’t begin in bitterness and slander.
What do you think was going on in the Gospel reading where Christ called a Syro-Phoenician woman a “dog?” LOTS of ink has been spilt over that one, let me tell you! You know how both McCain and Obama have made verbal gaffs during the campaign......and they’ll make more...both of them..........but then the “SPIN DOCTORS” try to clear it all up and tell us why they didn’t mean what they, obviously, said? Well, we get that over this gospel reading, too. It should give every Catholic some humility as we listen to the candidates, if nothing else. Anyone can say something others find offensive.
Now...how have the “Spin doctors” (theologians) handled it? The early Fathers seemed to think that Christ was merely “building” up suspense, playing to what He knew the disciples were thinking, only to reverse the argument, and show them DRAMATICALLY that God is broader than we thought!!! Modern scripture commentators who find “the miraculous” difficult to accept, and who think Christ had to “mature” into His role, that He couldn’t have possibly had all knowledge from the cradle, are saying that this is evidence that He, too, grew in His self-formation, putting the Divine Wisdom into practice. You can use either, as far as I’m concerned. The point is that by the end of the lesson, everyone in attendance saw that this Arab woman from Beirut, of all places....ENEMY TERRITORY...was spiritually gifted, Graced by God, and worthy of all respect and miraculous intervention. The “UNacceptable to humans was MOST ACCEPTABLE and MOST LOVED by God....hence, the need for “Emotional Vigilance” which one way or the other, Christ taught in the story. We can’t let our “preconceived notions” of people’s backgrounds and beliefs close our minds and hearts to their worth and value, for, as Isaiah would tell us, it is only in mutual collaboration with them that we will create “a House of Prayer for all peoples!”
This weekend’s message seems to be that God is calling each one of us..........His beloved children.......to be broader in our respect, and to be especially Vigilant Emotionally as we move through life’s shoals. We can create friendships or enmities...so much depends on what we say, and how we “label” things. Are we facing “animals?” Or, are we facing God’s “pets?” Christ taught us how to “re-lable” those we’ve been calling enemies, so that they can be seen in a new light that might lead to friendship and deeper collaboration in goodness for the world.
My prayer for each of us is that as we are fed Divine Strength, and Divine Wisdom in the Holy Sacraments, this weekend, that we will have the wherewithal and the creativity to follow in the Footsteps of the Prince of Peace and allow our lives–our words and our deeds–to be benedictions of goodness and peace in our world.......building bridges to those who were once “far off” so that, together, we may create a Sanctuary of Spiritual Strength in our earth. And may God bless you all.+
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