Year B Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Ps 18:2-4.47.51; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 12:28b-34

Today is the thirty-first of October and the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time. Of course, 31 October is All Hallows Eve, the beginning of a liturgical festival of All Saints and All Souls. Therefore, it seems expedient, in the light of today’s Gospel, to reflect on just what it is that makes a saint.

In his novel, The Woman Who Was Poor, French writer Léon Bloy wrote: “There is only one sadness, and that is for us not to be saints.” Bloy also wrote: “Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.” Anyone who has truly loved knows that to love, at least to some extent, is to suffer. In Christ Jesus, we have the prime example of this reality.

The words that constitute the heart of today’s readings are not spoken by Jesus. Rather, they are spoken by the scribe who sought out the Lord: “’to love your neighbor as yourself' is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”¹ In short, loving your neighbor is primarily how you love “God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”² It’s important to bear in mind that Mark’s Gospel was written in Rome in the midst of and for a Christian community experiencing great suffering.

Anything you might do for the love of God if you fail or refuse to love your neighbor as you love yourself is not acceptable to God. In the thirteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, in his great treatise on love, Saint Paul makes this crystal clear:

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing³

If I do nice things for someone but, in my heart, despise that person, “I gain nothing.” The hardest work those who follow Jesus have to engage in is heart work. Conversely, we can engage in a lot of pious works and, like the rich young man in our Gospel three weeks ago, lack the one thing necessary to “inherit eternal life.”⁴

What does it mean to love your neighbor? It means not judging her/him. It means not condemning him/her. It means forgiving as many times as s/he offends you. It means praying and doing good things for someone who sets her/himself against you. Doesn’t Jesus’s command to love your enemies assume that you have some? It’s been observed that not having enemies simply means you’ve never stood for anything. Loving only those who love me is hardly a model of Christian living.

It’s easy to fixate on the injunction in our reading from Deuteronomy to keep all the precepts of the Law. Love and love alone fulfills the Law. As Jesus demonstrates over and again in his interactions with the scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees, the Law is but a means to the end of loving God with your entire being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself.

Not being a Levite, but a member of the tribe of Judah, Jesus could not be a high priest according to the Law. He is not our high priest merely because he is God’s Son. What makes him our great high priest is his willingness, as the great kenotic hymn in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians indicates, to let go of what we, as humans, take to be his divinity and to empty himself to the point of accepting death on the cross.⁵ He did this for love of the Father and of you and me. Jesus did what humanity could never do: fulfill the Law of God, the Law of Love. The cross, in the end, proves to be the ultimate sign of his Godhood.

According to the late theologian Fr. Herbert McCabe, the central doctrine of Christianity consists of the recognition that “if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”⁶ This is important when addressing the basic existential question: To love or not to love? This dilemma, which captures the often-ambivalent nature of our humanity, is well articulated in an old song by the Scottish band, Del Amitri: “It's hard to say you love someone and it’s hard to say you don't.”⁷

As Jesus’s followers, our vocation is to love in a self-emptying way. This is what the Eucharist, which itself is the means to the end of loving God and your neighbor, is all about. In Eucharistic Prayer III, after the consecration of the bread and the wine, we pray:

May he [Jesus Christ] make of us
an eternal offering to you,
so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect,
especially with the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,
blessed Joseph, her Spouse,
with your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs
and with all the Saints,
on whose constant intercession in your presence
we rely for unfailing help

Being human, all too human, we are prone to turn means into ends. We do this because it is easier to keep a list of (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) rules than it is to love others in a Christlike way come what may. The difficulty lies in the reality that a willingness to love is a willingness to suffer, to be vulnerable. Without the cross, there is no love. Without love, there is no life, certainly no eternal life.

Being perfect as God is perfect consists of nothing except loving perfectly. “God is love.”⁸ Love is what makes saints.

---

1 Mark 12:33.^↩
2 Mark 12:30.^↩
3 1 Corinthians 13:1-3.^↩
4 Mark 10:17.^↩
5 Philippians 2:5-11.^↩
6 Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 20. 19 October 2006.^↩
7 “Driving With the Brakes On,” Del Amitri, 1995.^↩
8 1 John 4:8.16.^↩

Reflecting on my experience of the pandemic thus far

I haven't been terribly diligent lately about posting on Fridays. For those who read what I write, you'll grasp why this is the case recently. My period of isolation is over. I had a bit of a vaccine dilemma this week, which worked out. I now have my booster shot, which was a full dose of the Moderna vaccine. While I experienced only the symptom of losing my sense of smell, the day after my booster was rough.

When I think back to how scared I was of the virus, I marvel at myself. I have now been infected twice: in March 2020 and October 2021. So, I've experienced both variants. Again, my second infection was not bad at all. It sucks not to be able to smell and to have my taste impacted by this. I have little doubt that being fully vaccinated was the key factor in not experiencing worse symptoms. In any case, I no longer personally fear the virus. My main concern is not to infect others. But that is a tricky business.

I am not sure how I feel about all the mandates being issued. In many ways, these seem to exacerbate the problems we're experiencing. After the past few weeks, I have a slightly different perspective on some of these questions. I have few doubts about the safety of the vaccines. The efficacy of the vaccines isn't great for keeping one from being infected with sars-cov-2 but I think it greatly lessens the impact of the virus on those who are vaccinated. I am glad I am vaccinated and boosted. I encourage others to do so as well.

Will this pandemic end? What constitutes the criteria for ending a pandemic? I am sure the criteria are in place. Life will remain greatly altered by the pandemic for quite a while.

I had been looking forward to October being less stressful than September. But this month has proven to be the worst month, thus far, of a not-so-great year. In many ways, 2020 was a better year for me than 2021 has been so far. I get that time is kind of arbitrary. There is nothing magical or supernatural about a year. Nonetheless, it is how we mark time. I certainly pray that 2022 will be an improvement over this year. Specifically, I pray during 2022 the pandemic will end.

What about a traditio? Since for Roman Catholics, Fridays are traditionally penitential days and since I really love Greg LaFollette's album Songs of Common Prayer, our traditio for this final Friday of October is "Most Merciful God." LaFollette's album is based on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. So, today's traditio is not so much ecumenical as it is truly Catholic.

Given the subject I address above combined with my choice of traditio for today, it's probably important to explicitly note that I do not think the pandemic is a divine punishment for real or imagined offense(s) against God or whatever. As the late theologian James P. Mackey noted: "the [only] punishment for sin is a self-inflicted punishment by humanity on humanity" (Christianity and Creation, 115).

Do you want to see?

Mark 10:46-52

Jesus, son of David, have pity on me." Thus spake Bartimaues, son of Timaeus. By calling Jesus "son of David," Bartimaeus acknowledges Jesus as Messiah. By so doing he expressed faith in him to do what he ultimately did for him. When asked by Jesus what the blind man wanted, he answered this direct question in an equally direct way: "I want to see." His desire was realized and, once he could see, Bartimaeus followed Jesus on the way.

Ignorance is a form of blindness. Traditionally, in the Catholic idiom, we speak of vincible and invincible ignorance. Invincible ignorance refers to being ignorant of something and being ignorant that you're ignorant of it. In other words, left on your own, you can't overcome it. Hence, it's invincibility. Vincible ignorance, on the other hand, while it does not necessarily mean one's ignorance is willful, is ignorance that can be remedied should one care to do so.

Writing about repentance and preparing for confession, Søren Kierkegaard, in one of his Upbuilding Discourses entitled "Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing," writes of "an ignorance about one's own life that is equally tragic for the learned and the simple." This ignorance is "self-deceit." Self-deceit is perhaps not so much blindness as it is a refusal to look. A refusal to look amounts to the same thing as blindness: not being able to see.

Perhaps the greatest self-deceit is to consider yourself righteous. All self-perceived righteousness is self-righteousness. Think of bragging about one's own humility. Kierkegaard goes on to insist, rightly, that our sins don't render us unacceptable to God, not in the least. Our sins alienate us from ourselves and from other people. When you prepare for confession by making an examination of your conscience you are doing the same thing Bartimaeus does in today's Gospel. You should do it with the same confidence as the blind man from ancient Jericho.

One of Kierkegaard's most-quoted lines comes from this upbuilding discourse: "The prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who offers it." While this line can stand on its own two feet, it is important to point out that he wrote it to make a point concerning one of the most common objections to going to confession: If God knows everything already, then why do I need to confess?

In a good confession, one for which you've prayerfully prepared, you learn something about yourself. "Not God," Kierkegaard insists, "but you, the maker of the confession, get to know something by your act of confession." This is why the best confessors ask you questions, not about the details and specificity of your sins, which are likely banal to another person (everyone knows what porn, fornication, adultery, lying, cheating, stealing are), as an accountant might, but about yourself, your disposition, seeking to bring you to a greater level of awareness about your proclivities and propensities.

I don't mind sharing that several years ago, after having made my confession, which mostly had to do with sins of anger and impatience, which led me to use harsh and hurtful language, the priest hearing my confession, who knows me, asked simply, "When do you relax?" It was evident to me in a nanosecond how deeply relevant his question was. Now, I would like to say that from that day forward I have made a point of taking it easier with regularity and I no longer commit those sins, but well... But when I struggle in that way this question remains a touchstone for me.

It's troubling to hear people crow loudly that they have no regrets, feel no remorse, etc. This is a blind person who proclaims that not only can he see but can see with great clarity. A life without remorse is certainly not a Christian life. A life without remorse isn't a human life. To succeed at being remorseless is, in the end, to fail or, if you insist, to have succeeded in deceiving yourself. Far better to say, "I want to see."

Selfless service

As a deacon, I need to point out that Jesus is the deacon par excellence. He is a deacon because he came to serve and not to be served. Jesus became great by becoming less than nothing. Christians win by losing and succeed by failing.

Our first reading is taken from one of Isaiah's Servant Songs. Assuming that these Servant Songs point to Jesus Christ (something Christians generally tend to assume), it should not be lost on us that the very beginning of our first reading tells us that it "pleased" God "to crush him," the Servant. It is because of affliction, not despite it, he will live.

Yet, despite all of this, we still want to win by winning and succeed by succeeding. In short, we want to be served rather than to serve. As our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, Christ is our great High Priest who can intercede for us because, once again, of his afflictions.

In baptism, you were anointed as priest, prophet, royalty. Hence, the life of every baptized person is to be lived in imitatio Christi. I don't mind repeating that just as there is a priesthood of all the baptized, there is a diaconate of all the baptized.

Like last week, the core message of this week's readings is not difficult to figure out. What is difficult is receiving the message and taking it to heart. We avoid this directness because it makes big demands on us. It's important to keep in mind that service is not a list of specific tasks to be carried out. For Christians, service is the mode of Christian life. Another thing I think it's important to reiterate is that orthopraxis (right action) is more important than orthodoxy (right belief).

As it pertains to the Church, broadly construed [there is no Christianity without the Church and the only way to conceive of the Church is broadly, consisting of all the baptized], I beg your indulgence in posting a brief excerpt from my dissertation:

Noting the fundamental shift in how the world relates to the church since the Enlightenment, which liberated people from sometimes-stifling ecclesial control, synchronizing with the Second Vatican Council, especially Gaudium et spes, [Avery] Dulles notes how important it is for the church to adapt to this new situation. Failure to adapt to this situation, he insists, is that the “Church admonishes the world [and] the world, generally speaking feels justified in paying no heed.” What this adaptation consists of is recognizing that Christ came to serve and not be served and so the church places itself at the service of the world. Hence, Dulles points out that the model of church “that best harmonizes with this attitude is that of Servant" [from Dulles's Models of Church]

Life's "inevitable harshness"- a lesson

This past Wednesday, I tested positive for COVID-19. This is my second bout with COVID. I also contracted it in March 2020, at the onset of the global pandemic. In the interim, I was fully vaccinated in January 2021. I have tried to be mindful of adhering to recommended guidelines, including masking, social distancing, etc. I believe I began to experience very minor symptoms the Thursday before my positive test. Other than losing my sense of taste (to some extent) and smell, which was my tip-off that I might have COVID, I experienced no symptoms.

My family, all of whom but our 10-year-old are fully vaccinated, and who had COVID in March 2020, just completed their quarantine. Since I had been out-of-town, rather than coming home, I stayed away until the end of their isolation period. But now, I am isolating. I would be lying, either by omission or commission, either to admit to insist to contrary that I am not deeply discouraged by this. I have been in touch with the health officials in my county. I am to isolate until a week from Sunday. I am participating in my state's test and trace. I have notified the few people, including my Mom, with whom I've been in close contact.

The take-away at this point is that trying to do the right thing doesn't guarantee success. This realization is a bummer. As I mentioned last weekend, one of the books I am currently reading is the late Father Charles Cummings, OSCO's book Monastic Practices. In his chapter on "Self-Discipline," which I read yesterday, he wrote: "The first form of monastic self-discipline is cheerfully and generously to accept the inevitable harshness of life and to endure difficulties that come our way in the course of each day..."

I would be hardpressed to think of anything that could speak more where I am at right now than this. If you can spare a prayer for me, I'd certainly appreciate it.

In other bad news, Paddy Moloney, founder of the extraordinary Irish band The Chieftans died this week. Our traditio today is The Chieftans, led by Paddy, singing "Here's A Health to the Company."

What do you lack?

Mark 10:17-30

The lesson of today's readings is not very cryptic. It is summed up in these words: "how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!" Or, more specifically, "It is easier for a camel to pass through [the] eye of [a] needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Contrary to the weirdly popular pseudo-explanation, Jesus here is not speaking of a narrow gate in the wall of Jerusalem that is difficult but not impossible for a camel to pass through. He is literally referring to a camel going through the eye of a needle used for sewing. Something that is truly impossible. Of course, nothing is impossible for God, even saving the rich. In the context of this passage, this is nothing short of a truly great miracle.

According to Jesus, far from being God's greatest blessing, as many people in the U.S. suppose, material wealth and the comfort it brings is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the kingdom of God for many people. In its most exaggerated forms, the so-called "Prosperity Gospel" is ridiculous to most people. But this false Gospel takes more subtle and insidious forms. At root, it is a matter of in what or in whom do you place your trust.

In light of today's readings, take some time to consider this question: What is the one thing I lack? What am I so attached to that giving it up would constitute a huge deprivation? It may not be money or a possession. Perhaps it is an activity, one that costs a fair amount of money and takes up a lot of your time.

We are pretty quick to de-radicalize what it means to follow Jesus. We seem to have difficulty trusting in Jesus's promise that whatever we give up to follow him will, in some unspecified way, be returned one hundred times over. In the end, the kingdom of God is what receive/inherit/enter into. Otherwise, it would simply be an extension of precisely what Jesus calls his followers to reject.

This is not pie-in-the-sky religion. Being incarnational, Christianity knows nothing of such a thing, despite the attempts of many to distort it in this way. This prompts another question, maybe life's deepest question: What do you really want? What is it you really desire? Why is it that in a moment of satisfaction you often become conscious of the fleetingness of that moment and are struck by the question, "Is this all there is?"

Why did the young man go away sad? Was it only because Jesus urged him to give up his riches and he couldn't bring himself to do it? What dissatisfaction or hope for satisfaction do you suppose led him to approach Jesus in the first place? Was his awareness of his lack of satisfaction coupled with his refusal to take a risk that caused him to go away sad?

Today's reading isn't really about the rich young man. It's about the kingdom of God, which, as Thomas Nevin, with a nod to Georges Bernanos, notes: "there is only God's kingdom." It's not a matter of seeing it as much as it is a matter of living it. As Jesus indicates, especially for those who have, the price of entry can seem high.

COVID: disruption, absence, quiet

Ah, COVID. September was a busy month for me. This busyness extended through the first weekend in October due to our annual gathering of deacons and wives from throughout our expansive diocese (~85k square miles). It was kind of nice being on the road, driving to Southern Utah and back, then to New Mexico and back, then finally to Provo, where we convened our diaconal gathering. Well, while I was away my wife became ill and ultimately tested positive again for the Sars virus. So, here illness, again, is COVID. All of this despite having had COVID in March 2020 and being vaccinated (Pfizer) in July.

This extended my time away from home. Rather than go home from Provo, I drove up and have been staying with my Mom. An additional benefit of this is that it is only about 7-8 minutes away from my office, as opposed to the 30-minute one-way drive. It's been a practice in minimalism as I only have what I packed in my suitcase and backpack. Hence, I do laundry about every 3 days. I have my Liturgy of the Hours book and my Ordo. Of course, my Rosary. I also brought the current issues of Commonweal and America.

More importantly, I have two books: Monastic Practices, Revised Edition by the late Trappist monk, who most of his monastic life at Our Lady of the Holy Trinity Abbey here in Huntsville, Utah. Since I am participating in Renovaré Book Club. Our first book is Rich Villodas's The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus. These two books are very complementary.

I suppose my time away from home is a little like an extended retreat. As you might imagine, it is quieter. This makes it a good time to engage in some spiritual formation. Perhaps I will share some of what strikes me as I make my way through these books. But that is more work than I want to do today. And I like it. I never realize how busy and even frantic my life is until I slow down. Today is a day of slowing down. In fact, this whole weekend will be slow and quiet. I need to just enter into the silence.

What about our traditio? How about something that is the opposite of quiet, slow, and realizing? Green Day's Billy Joe Armstrong singing "Manic Monday." This song was written pseudonymously by Prince and originally recorded by The Bangles for their 1986 album Different Light. Prince initially intended the song for the group Apollonia 6. Billy Joe is accompanied on lead guitar by none other than Susanna Hoffs.

Love and marriage according to Jesus

Mark 10:2-16

Marriage: the mystery of two people made one by their love of God and one another. It seems to me that marriage, a sacrament grounded in love, is essentially Triune. The best way I have found to understand and explain this is to ask, more than a bit rhetorically: "What is the Holy Spirit but the love between the Father and the Son personified?" Clearly, this is not a "natural" family. It is a supernatural family.

Even the Holy Family is not a natural family but an incarnation of the supernatural family. The Church, composed as it is of God's adopted children, reborn through Christ in the waters of baptism by the Spirit's power, is a supernatural family. As Jesus asked earlier in Saint Mark's Gospel: "Who are my mother and [my] brothers?" He answered his own question: "whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" (see Mark 3:30-31).

Love that is love, while it certainly has an indispensably affective dimension, goes beyond feeling. Love is not only a choice, an act of the will but a difficult, sometimes sacrificial choice. Love requires putting one's beloved before one's self, setting aside one's own wants, desires, and convenience. This is an easy, even beautiful thing to write or to say, but it is hard to do, very hard. I know because I fail at it regularly.

In Jesus's day, a divorced woman faced a predictably frightening future. It would be difficult if not impossible for her to remarry. If she had family to fall back on and who were willing to assist her, she might be alright. If not, she wouldn't be. Discarded women in Jesus's culture may have had to turn to prostitution or, failing that, begging.

It's important to note that there was no question of a woman divorcing her husband. Nonetheless, in his normal somewhat oblique way, Jesus seeks to level the playing field. He goes further back in the Law- back to Genesis. He invokes what I call the Bible's Ur verse on marriage: Genesis 2:24. You see, while love is prolific, it isn't just about sex and procreation. As many married couples who don't have children of their own demonstrate, love can be prolific (pro-life-ic) in many and varied ways.

It is not a random juxtaposition that Mark's Gospel has Jesus welcome little children at end of his teaching on divorce. It's a tough teaching. With this teaching, he publicly rebuked then then-current Jewish ethos, grounded in the Law. He did so by clearly demonstrating from the Law that Moses (not God), permitted divorce only because of the failure of so many to love. What is sin but our failure to love?

Who does Jesus point to as an example of the kind of love that incarnates God's kingdom? Little children. As the first line of Ubi Caritas, translated into English, states: "Where charity and love are, God is there." While the Eucharist is the sacramentum caritatis, flowing as it does from the altar of God, Christian marriage, too, is a sacrament of love.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: Depending on God's tenderness

The first of October is the Feast Day ot Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. For those who may not know, the Little Flower is a Doctor of the Church. She is one of my best saintly friends.

Thérèse, known affectionately as "the Little Flower," knew despair and despondency. In her painful suffering, she even wrestled with the temptation of suicide.

Perhaps her most famous devotee is the famous French singer Edith Piaf. Known as "the Little Sparrow," Piaf, who was raised in the brothel where her grandma was the Madame, was taught by one of the women who worked there as a prostitute to seek the Little Flower's help. Throughout her life, during many travels, Piaf would often seek out a statue or a shrine to the Little Flower.

Pope Francis, who, along with Saint Joseph, has a great devotion to our Thérèse. The Holy Father urges us "not be afraid to depend solely on the tenderness of God as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux did." Of course, to depend solely on God's tenderness, is to be tenderized. Following the Little Way of the Little Flower is to walk the path of tenderness. We should have special tenderness for those who suffer.

The depth and intensity of Thérèse's experience of God is caputured brilliantly by Tomáš Halík in his book Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us. In his writing about Thérèse, Halík relies on the work of Thomas Nevin published in The Last Years of Saint Therese: Doubt and Darkness, 1895-1897. While I am recommending reading, here is a blog post that tells about Pope Francis relationship with the Little Flower: "Pope Francis and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: 'To depend solely on the tenderness of God.'"

As this great Doctor of the Church taught us, we need bring nothing to Jesus: "The guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us – that is all He asks."

O Little Therese of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose
from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love.

O Little Flower of Jesus, ask God to grant the favors
I now place with confidence in your hands . .

(mention in silence here)

St. Therese, help me to always believe as you did in
God’s great love for me, so that I might imitate your “Little Way” each day.

Amen

Our traditio for the first Friday in October is the Little Sparrow singing what is perhaps her most internationally famous song, "Non, Je ne regrette rien:"