I left home two weeks after graduating from High School. I started summer school at the university immediately. And, when I left home for college, my father and mother paid my summer school tuition and dorm fees and gave me a portable typewriter. In addition to this, my father gave me the book, Ethan Frome, a novel by Edith Wharton, which I read during the orientation stuff. Now, I don't know if you've read that novel–I think it was made into a movie about 10 or 15 years ago–but it is a pretty boring novel. Nothing much happens. Ethan marries a hypochondriac, who gets her assurance of Ethan's love for her as he cares for her in increasing intensity, until finally, he has to hire a sitter to be wirh her...and of course, the inevitable happens, and he and the sitter fall in love, but this was VERY PROPER NEW ENGLAND of the 1700's and people didn't have affairs, so they decided to do the only thing they knew how to do, they decided to kill themselves.....so they get on a snow sled, on a mountain side, and careen into a tree–but they aren't killed, after all, and Ethan's "hypochondriac wife" has to get out of her sick bed and tend them. So, why, you ask, did my father give me that book? That's what I asked him when I went home for vacation on the 4th of July weekend. I said, "Dad, why did you give me that book?"
His response–he always knew how to push my buttons–was to ask, "Well, did you read it?" I retorted sharply, "Of course I read it!"
Then, he asked me, when in that novel did any of the characters make what you would call a real "moral decision?" And I had to say, "I don't know." They weren't "thinkers," and they didn't really decide anything...even their suicide attempt had been a last minute whim on a snowy evening.
And Dad almost jumped at me, and barked, "That's exactly right! They didn't make decisions. They just allowed themselves to be carried along by a sort of inertia, as they drifted toward the precipice." And then, he said that most of life is like that. Very rarely do we actually make big moral decisions. Most of life is just plodding along, laughing and griping our way toward tomorrow. "And, then, one day, we see how cut off and lonely we have become, and we know we have sinned."
"Sinned?" I asked? My father rarely talked of religion, and never about sin. "Yes, sinned! he said. "Sin is when we allow ourselves to dissipate, and we end up being so much less than we know we can be. Life is such a wonderful gift, and to fritter it away meaninglessly is sinful."
So, as we talked about that novel I learned something about my father. He didn't think Old Ethan and his girlfriend, the sitter, were sinful for falling in love, moreover, he thought their suicide plan more stupid than sinful. He saw "sinfulness" in the hypochondriac wife who refused to live to her potential and created the circumstances of the whole mess, and in the refusal of Ethan and the sitter to choose a life together....all sins of "omission."
Now this isn't a literature class or a philosophy class. I'm not asking you to agree or disagree with my father's literary analysis of Wharton's characters. Rather, I'm asking you to think about your own life. I think you'll see how uncomfortably true my father's analysis is. Most of us don't make large moral decisions most of the time. Most of our days drift–we sit with friends who are bigots, and smile at them. We listen to alcoholic ramblings of relatives, and we smile at them. We deal with bosses who are so out of touch with the real world, but we smile at them. Generally, we just try to live without causing a lot of pain and anxiety in others. And, in the process, the days slip away, and we are defined not by our decisions but by our lassitude.
The readings, today, are about moments when moral decisions are necessary, and where just smiling and nodding won't work. Joshua says to the Israelites, "You can do what you want, but as for me and my house—WE WILL SERVE THE LORD!" That is a deciding moment put into conscious words. Jesus, sensing that the crowds have left him, including many of those who had been very close–he turns to the 12 and says, "Will you leave me, too?" And Peter says, "No, we won't." And that was a defining moment. It defined the Church and its nature. We are not a church of the pulpit, seeking correct definitions for everything, nor are we Torah scholars, combing the Bible for forgotten truths. Rather, we are a "Table People," whose destiny is to face each other in covenant, and humbly receive into ourselves the Body and Blood of Christ with the hope that we will be, thereby, transformed into His likeness, so that we, too, can find a way to love everyone! At this table the bright student and the dullard eat the same food and hope for the same transformation. It isn't about getting deeper insights into the Text of the Bible, or getting a warm fuzzy feeling in the chest....the transformation we seek is something that opens our minds to a greater love for all humanity.
"You shall love your neighbor as yourself," was set as a goal for us by the One Who gives Himself to us in Eucharist, at this table, and we take it seriously. We sense that we live in a world of 6 billion strangers. And strangers tend to fear each other, and fear causes all sorts of ugly defensive and offensive behavior, and before you know it, violence and war and mutual destruction are the result. And who will make of these 6 billion strangers "family?" Who will bring them to the family table? Who will sit with them and break bread? Who will make strangers into family? THAT is the question. And John's gospel and all the gospels answer that question with: "THE FOLLOWERS OF CHRIST can do that!" We have been given the Grace of "making family from strangers." That is what Eucharist demands......you bring the world to your family table!
Today's readings hope we will not "sin" in my father's sense of that word. They hope we will not cower before our goal, but rather that we will allow ourselves to be transformed by the POWER we receive here, into that force of goodness and love that can create family out of potential enemies, and friendship out of foes. May God be with us all this week as we seek to make our lives benedictions of goodness in our world. And may God bless you all. +
-Father Bill Axe, O.SS.T.
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