Taken in an aggregate way, today's readings urge us to focus on the things that really matter. In his short book, the English title of which is simply On Prayer (in its original German the title is Von der Not und dem Segen des Gebetes - On the Need and Blessing of Prayer), the late Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner hit the nail-on-the-head beginning at the top of the very first page. Late in his life, when asked which of his many works he found most pleasing in retrospect, he indicated this short book. He intimated that he felt he had synthesized his theology very well in it.
From the very beginning of On Prayer:
Human life is made up of many and varied activities. Deep in the human heart is the longing, fitfully glimpsed and but half realized, to gather up all these strivings into an intense pursuit of one all-embracing objective worthy of the toil and tears and devotion of the human heart. Such is the half-shaped dream; but the reality is a picture of heaped-up activities, where the trivial jostles the less trivial, and the less trivial elbows the important things, and there is no unity of design, nor any intensity of single, concentrated purpose. There is no real perspective of values: what is essentially trivial but immediately urgent, looms large and commands attention; while what is essentially important, but not immediately urgent or insistent, is relegated to the hazy recesses of the background. But the thing of greatest importance is not always what is demanded by the needs of the momentOf course, the last sentence refers to prayer. If anything, advanced Western society has grown more fragmented in the nearly 70 years since Rahner wrote those words. To borrow a well-worn cliché, this observation has as much if not more relevance now than when it was written.
Prayer, meditation, contemplation, which require both solitude and silence, are, as Rahner insisted, "essentially important." However, they are not urgent and usually not insistent, especially if you have never formed the habit of practicing these disciplines. Indeed, we call these practices "spiritual disciplines."
When discussing spiritual disciplines, it is important to note up-front that they are not magic or transactional in nature (i.e., my doing y does not necessarily result in God doing x as a result). It is also necessary to note that disciplines are not ends in themselves but means to the end for which we are created and redeemed. These spiritual disciplines are time-tested and proven means of sanctification.
At least from a Christian perspective, practicing spiritual disciplines are the means to the end of loving God with your entire being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. These ends can be summarized as becoming Christ-like or, to borrow a more ancient term, divinized. It is through silence, solitude, prayer, meditation, and contemplation that you not only discern how to live the circumstances in which you find yourself each day but these help us makes sense of what we experience- life is strange and the unexpected happens frequently.
Our first reading from Ecclesiastes deals with exactly the same thing Rahner dealt with at the beginning of On Prayer. So much so that the lengthy quote above can accurately be viewed as an updated version of this reading. Are you someone whose "business," or occupation, is worry? If so, why? Making worry your occupation shows a distinct lack of trust in the Lord, who repeatedly tells his followers not to worry, even about life's most basic needs. The very next section of this same chapter from which today's Gospel reading is taken contains Jesus's teaching about not worrying about what you will eat or what you will wear, etc. In effect, the Lord tells his disciples not to put their hope (i.e., their trust) in ephemeral or passing things.
Detail from Jesus Teaching the Sermon on the Mount, by Fra Angelico, 1442
In today's Gospel, the Lord urges us, as his followers, to "guard against all greed" (Luke 12:15). In the original Greek, the word translated here as "greed" transliterates as pleonexias. Literally, pleonexias means "having more." As his followers, Jesus is telling us to guard against our seemingly insatiable desire to have more. This means guarding against the temptation to equate having more money with security, having a bigger house or more things "completing" you, fighting against the mindset that "What I need to be truly happy is (fill-in-the-blank)." I think most of us have had the experience of thinking some achievement, possession, experience, amount of money is what we need to be fulfilled, only to attain the achievement, acquire the possession, have the experience, or receive the money and then experience an anti-climax- the realization that it is nothing more than ashes and dust.
Disciples of Jesus not only revel in having less but in giving what they have to those in need in the certainty that doing so is the path to fulfillment, the realization of her destiny. Jesus did not come to make you monetarily or materially wealthier, or even secure. He makes the same point over and over in varied ways that wealth, far from being the assurance of divine favor, is an obstacle to be overcome. Jesus came to make you truly wealthy by urging you to divest yourself of what you don't need and by encouraging to you to use what comes your way to help those in distress. Any person or any doctrine that teaches otherwise is not only un-Christian, it is anti-Christian!
Too often we reduce the call to discipleship to some imaginary form of "being moral," which we mistake for true righteousness. To give but one example, we assiduously avoid saying words like "fuck," "damn," or "shit." Most Christians do not realize that St. Paul, in several places in his letters, uses what many would consider to be "bad," even shocking, words. Drawing from Isaiah, Paul likens the works we do that we are prone to think make us "righteous" to used tampons. He says he would like to castrate the Judaizers, whom he sarcastically calls "super-apostles." He uses the Koine Greek equivalent of "shit" for sure. Too often what we think of as righteousness is nothing more than self-congratulatory and self-righteous nonsense. Biblically-speaking, usually a better translation of words rendered in English as "righteous" is "just."
What the Lectionary has been providing us with the past 6 weeks or so is nothing less than the heart of the Gospel. We know it constitutes the heart of the Gospel because what Jesus teaches us to do is way harder than not "swearing," etc. Because being a Christian is so contrary to how we are socialized, which socialization finds its origin in our fallen human nature, being a Christian seems to cut against the grain of our very being. The Gospel confronts us, challenges us, provokes us. This is why Paul refers to living as a Christian as an agon. Agon refers to a battle, or a struggle. Agon is the root of our English word "agony." Never be deceived, the only way to resurrection is through the cross.
It is to the cross that Jesus leads his followers. This is the pattern of discipleship that can be discerned so easily in St. Luke's Gospel and that of the other Synoptics (i.e., Matthew and Mark). Back in the ninth chapter of Luke, the inspired author tells his readers: "When the days for his being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem..." (Luke 9:51). As Msgr Luigi Giussani sagely observed: "[Christ] mounted the Cross to free us from the fascination with nothingness, to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral." Putting your trust in money, status, or possessions is nihilism pure and simple. It is a fascination with nothingness.
The point of Jesus's story about the rich man is simple enough: he who dies with the most possessions and/or money still dies. Moreover, he dies in a perilous state, a state liable to harsh judgment. You can't buy or bribe your way into God's kingdom. Besides, if you are not striving live as if God's kingdom is a present reality, seeking to make it present, even if in small ways, like a mustard seed, you are not preparing yourself for beatitude, for the happiness that comes from putting others before yourself. The time for repentance, for conversion, for change is now, not later.
Once again, Paul in our second reading is discussing the effect baptism should have on our lives. Remember, in baptism you died, were buried, and rose through and in Christ to new life by the power of the Holy Spirit. As a result, baptism should bring about the change of heart and mind (in Greek metanoia, frequently translated as "repentance"), what we might call the "conversion," or "change," Jesus is calls us to make today. We think about the things above precisely by living in a different way here below. Living this way is called hope.
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