Why do you let us wander?

 A Homily 

for the First Sunday in Advent

Why, Isaiah asks the Lord. Why do you let us wander?

I think of the three year old in the supermarket, squirming in that little seat in the grocery cart until his mother lets him run free.  And run free he does.  Down the aisle, past the apple sauce, knocking over the display of dried macaroni and running like a demon toward that tower of Oreos, beckoning to him like the promised land. That little one know what wandering away is like a bat, if you can describe anyone running that fast as wandering.

And he’s running down the aisle, because he’s learned how much fun chasing after all the bright shiny things can be. Which is fine, except that if we spend all of our time running after the bright shiny things, we we will find we have no time for what is most important…time with the Lord.

Martha learned that lesson the hard way.  You remember the story. Jesus was visiting Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus. Mary, we are told, “sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said,” but Martha was running about, like a little kid in a supermarket, cooking dinner and cleaning the house and doing all kinds of stuff that just needed to be done.  And in one of the most candid exchanges of the Gospels, she turns to Jesus and says: "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" 

Jesus’ reply is spoken not only to her, but to me: ”Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

Stop, sit down with the Lord and listen to him. Share with him the stirrings of your heart….

Advent is a time of waiting…waiting for the Lord. Listening for his still small voice. Hoping in his eternal love for you. Yet so often we are like Martha, running about looking for all the bright shiny things. So often we fail to stop, shut up and just listen for his still small voice.

For in order to hear him we need to empty our hearts of everything but gratitude. No grasping, no conniving or calculating. Just longing and gratitude in our still small hearts.

Especially, this week, just being grateful for all his blessings.

For the life which still flows in and out of your lungs without the help of a ventilator. For the blood which flows through your veins. For the thoughts you think and the myriad feelings which tremble through your limbs. For the people who love you and for those who are loved by you. For the thrill of a cold breeze, the beauty of the first snow, the sound of crumbling leaves under your feet, the smile of that little baby in her mother’s arms, for justice, truth and all the other joys  that await us at the dawn of each new day.

But with all the bright shining things, the first thing we seem to forget is to give thanks…

Which makes me think about one of the most colorful characters to walk the fields of Massachusetts in the decades following the American Revolution, Timothy Dexter.  Born in Malden, he made his first fortune by speculating in Continental currency.  His continuing success was due to a combination of audacity and incredible good luck. 

He was eccentric, but wise beyond his capacity, and never ceased to attribute his multiple successes to those who helped him along the way.  Indeed, gratitude was, in his view, the most important of virtues.

 “An ungrateful man,” he would frequently say, ‘is like a hog under a tree eating acorns, who never looks up to see where they came from.’

Remember the nine lepers in the Gospel parable who were just such narcissistic hogs?  Only one came back to give thanks, but the nine who were cleansed of their disease, cured of their disability, now set on getting on with their life, with not a smidgen of gratitude and not a word of thanks to the Lord who cured them.

And we are not so very different.  Sadly, ingratitude is so rampant in our day and age that we often become surprised by folks who are habitually grateful.

On the day I received my last postgraduate degree I practically sprained my wrist patting myself on the back.  But did I think of Miss Lucasak who first taught me cursive in third grade, or Miss Morin who encouraged us to write those one page essays with the pictures two years later.  Did I think of the Priest who first inspired me with a love for the Liturgy, or my parents who put me through College, or the inspiring professors I had come to know along the way.  Did I think of the scholars who had constructed that world of knowledge in which I had gained some small degree of proficiency, or those who built the institutions which had led me through those mysteries.

No, I thought of none of them, I never gave them a thought or a prayer.  I never said thank-you.  Just like the ungrateful lepers, I got on with my life and I never looked back.

It’s like those who were Baptized into Christ, learned to pray, made their First Communion and maybe were confirmed, but who now seem to have forgotten where the Church is, who seldom say a prayer, feed the poor, forgive, or even seek to love others as they were loved.  They go about living their lives, happy enough, but never full satisfied, getting along, but still uncertain about what it really means. For they have things to do, and they will continue to take, without looking back, and never say thank you.

And then there’s you and me.  Fickle, self-absorbed, and sinful as we are, we still try to crane our necks to at least look back.  To break the bread, to tell the story, and to give thanks as best we are able.

For that is what we do each day in this holy house: We celebrate the Eucharist, the thanksgiving: a memorial of recollection and gratitude, in which we remember all that He has done for us, from our first breath to our last, the love, the mercy, the sacrifice....the faith which makes sense of the darkest days and the mystery which defeats the deadly with eternal joy and eternal life.

Which is why, at Mass, speaking in the person of Christ himself, the priest calls out to us:  Lift up your hearts.  And we lift them up to the Lord.

And unlike ungrateful lepers or hogs, we will give thanks to the Lord our God.  For it is right to give him thanks and praise, even, in the words of a modern day poet:

"O Lord, we thank Thee for this world,

For every blessing, every good.

For earthly sustenance and love

Bestowed on us from heaven above.

Be present at our table, Lord.

Be here and everywhere adored.

Thy children bless and grant that we

May feast in paradise with Thee."

Talents, and Giving them Away

Here's my homily for this Sunday.

So they received talents from their Master. And the first one, who got five talents, invested it and doubled the investment. While the last fellow, who got one talent, buried it and got nothing but the wrath of an angry master.

 

Like those servants, we too receive many talents. Oh, I don't mean the Palestinian currency of a talent (which by the way, was worth about $6,000 dollars). No, I think Jesus was talking about something more than economics, and the kinds of talents he’s really talking about are worth more than money can buy.

 

For you have been given all kinds of talents.

 

There are those you were born with. Your beautiful eyes, or long silky hair or general good looks. Or your intelligence. Your ability to figure things out so much more quickly than everyone else.

 

And then there are the talents you acquired while you were growing up. Like an easy-going disposition and the ability to get along with just about everybody. Or a sense of self-confidence mixed with humility that has allowed you to get so much done in this life.

 

And then there are the talents which you have worked so hard for. Like your marriage or your vocation or that lifelong friendship. Or the fact you have been such a great mother or father. Or that job, which for thirty-seven years you worked and sacrificed to make a success.

 

All those are the talents you have been given by God. And what have you done with them?

 

If you have used them for your own selfish pleasure or tried to work them solely for your own good, you are like the man who buried the talent in his own back yard, where under the cold dark soil of winter, it just sat there and nothing came of it. And some day, God forbid, I’m afraid your master might send you to that place where there is nothing but wailing and gnashing of teeth.

 

But if you have sought to give it away (all those talents) to use them to love…then you have discovered a remarkable thing…that the talent given grows…it multiplies and will, someday, be returned to the God who first gave it to you doubled, or tripled or showing a return of a hundred fold.

 

It’s what Emily discovered when she went as a new bride with her Ensign husband to Gaeta, a small town in southern Italy where the flagship for the sixth fleet docked. It wasn’t exactly a Naval base, but the young wives of the young sailors would often rent an apartment in Gaeta, and the wives would wait (sometimes with the kids) while the ship went out to sea. 

 

Problem was, because it was such a top secret thing, not even the wives would know how long the guys would be gone, and that was particularly tough on the younger ones.

 

As Emily had experienced innumerable times over three long years. But she pushed through the anxiety and she and the three kids were now used to Gerry being gone, sometimes for almost a month. Kind of used to it, that is.

 

You see, I used to go down to Gaeta as my apostolate when I was a Deacon and then for the first year I was a student priest and say Mass for the Americans in a small Italian Church. One week I saw Emily and she looked a bit hassled, so I said a prayer for her. The next week I saw her again, and she was, to be honest, a mess.  Her hair was straggly and she just stared straight ahead while the kids ran around and screamed at each other under the pews. So I asked her after Mass how she was doing. She started to cry and told me that Gerry had been out to sea for three weeks and that she was at her wits end with the kids and the uncertainty and…she just cried. I tried to console her, but I knew it wasn’t going to help a lot. So I went back to Rome and prayed for her.

 

The next week, I saw Emily again. I was surprised that she looked so different, like a different person. Smiling and chatting with her pew mates, the kids all dressed up in their Sunday best and sitting there like little angels. So, after Mass I said “Emily, did Gerry get back this week?” “No,” she said, “but something wonderful happened.”

 

Last Tuesday, she told me, was the worst day I ever had. I was just getting ready to call the travel agency to get a ticket home when the door bell rang. It was the girl next door…she was very young and had been married for just two months ago and this was the first time her husband was out to sea.  She was crying and whining and in the mood I was in I just wanted to slap her and tell her to go away.

 

But for some reason I didn’t. With teeth gritted, I invited her to come in and got her a cup of tea.  And then I sat there and stared at her, (thinking to myself: you don’t know what its like to have three screaming kids and you’ve only been doing this for two months and you don’t know what suffering is…). But didn’t yell at the poor kid…rather, I sat there and I tried to smile, and before I knew it, I started to sympathize with her and to listen to her poor sad broken little heart…until after a few minutes (or maybe more than a few minutes) I started comforting her and all at once, for the first time in weeks, all my problems seemed so much smaller. In giving her comfort, I became comforted.

 

And ever since then, I don't really need to know when Gerry is coming back. Because I just learned an incredible lesson. When you love others, when you give it away, it comes backs a hundredfold.  And you know Father, I’m really at peace.

 

So, give it away, every talent you ever received. Invest it in others, with love, and maybe you will hear the master’s words someday: 'Well done, my good and faithful servant…come share in your master’s joy.”

On Loving the Alien...

Homily

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“You shall not oppress an alien, says the Lord, “for I am compassionate.” Rather, you shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers yourself.

 

And yet it’s so hard.  Is there anything harder than loving the person who is different from me. For they can make me angry, afraid and confused by what they say and do. It makes no sense to me. It’s like they're speaking a different language (and sometimes they are). To be honest, we sometimes just wish they would just go away and leave us alone.

That’s true of all the strangers, including the ones who don’t look like me or act like me. As it was true of Adams and Jefferson.

John Adams was 20 years old with a fresh bachelor’s degree from Harvard when he arrived in Worcester in 1751. The young and impudent fellow was brilliant and set out, with no lack of ambition, to become, in his words, “a great man.”  He eventually leaned toward the law as a profession, writing that he found in most clergymen “the pretended sanctity of absolute dunces.”

So, two years later, he began reading law under Worcester lawyer James Putnam. He was then admitted to the bar, was instrumental in the American revolution and became President of the United States.  But the important part is that he came to Worcester.

The year Adams came to the Worcester a fourteen year old Thomas Jefferson was burying his father in far away Virginia, where he would attend William and Mary College and an enthusiastic scholar, not at first in the law, but in philosophy and the natural sciences. He did later acquire a law degree, but as something of a second thought.

Both men were brilliant, but the similarities seem to end there.  One was tall, the other short and stout, one was elegant from cosmopolitan Virginia, while the other was a rough hewn farmer from Quincy, known for his bluntness.

But even more, our second and third Presidents embraced significantly different visions of governance and were frequently on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. The differences were never more evident than in the election of 1800 during which slander and personal attacks were the order of the day. 

Jefferson was accused of greater loyalties to France than the United States. One politician was quoted as saying “he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country.” (the politician was George Washington.

On the other hand, Adams was accused of being more British than American and with another prominent politician (the one about whom Lyn Manuel Miranda wrote a musical) of possessing “great and intrinsic defects in his character, which made him unfit to be [President].”

And when Jefferson won, after the contested election was deadlocked for weeks, the second and third Presidents of our country stopped talking to each other.

But then a remarkable thing happened in the last years of their life, when at the instigation of a common friend, Adams and Jefferson began to write to each other, indeed opening a floodgate of correspondence, what would become some 158 letters, beginning with Adams writing that despite the fact that they disagreed on almost every political issue of the day “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”¹ “You and I,” Adams continued, “ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”²

Jefferson replied on a variety of topics in an extraordinary exchange, once writing that like the various religious sects of the new nation, the two old frenimies were as different as could be, but were united, he suggested, by ‘the Principles of Christianity and the Principles of American Liberty.’³

——

And what do we have to learn from these two great men?  Why do I tell you their story. Because they teach me that what lasts, in the end, are not all the accomplishments, the brilliant ideas or triumphs.  What lasts…the only thing that really lasts is, in the words of our patron, “faith, hope and love…and the greatest of these is love.”

For what makes Jefferson and Adams truly great is not the role they played in government, or the titles they achieved, but the fact that they sought to love the ones who were so different from them, so alien and so strange. The ones who made them angry. The ones they could not understand.

——-

Well, that was the third and fourth Presidential elections in our nation’s history. And with just a little over a week to go before the the fifty-ninth Presidential election, most people have probably made up their minds, which means most people know who they are NOT going to vote for. That other one.

Which makes it all the more wonderful that Jesus reminds us to today to pray for the alien, the one we find strangest, the one not like ourselves.

And all the more challenging when Saint Paul says to us: 

Put away anger, fury, malice and slander….

Put on heartfelt compassion, 

kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, 

bear with one another 

forgive one another, as the Lord has forgiven you.

Over all these put on love, 

and let the peace of Christ control your hearts. 

__________

1 - Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 3:639–40.

2 - JA to TJ, 28 June 1813, Cappon, 2:338–40, in Gordon S. Wood. Friends Divided.

3 - JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:358, in Gordon S. Wood. Friends Divided.

4 - Cf. Colossians 13: 8-15

Knights of Columbus: Mass for Life

As we gather this morning to celebrate the annual Pro-Life Mass with the Knights of Columbus, I am conscious of the fact that our Founder, Father Michael McGivney, will be raised to the altar, beatified by order of Pope Francis in just three weeks at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Hartford.

Father McGivney was a remarkable man, who in just thirteen years of Priesthood taught us many lessons about the sanctity of human life.

Michael was brought up in mid-19th century Waterbury. The son of Irish immigrants, he was the oldest of thirteen children, six of whom died at a young age. And here’s where it gets incredible.

For the reason our Holy Father has ordered the beatification of Father McGivney in a couple weeks has to do with another family of 13 kids who live today in Tennessee. For thanks to Father Michael, their youngest is now five years old. Let me explain.

Michelle and Daniel Schachle were expecting their thirteenth child (there’s that number again!) when they went for the nineteen week ultrasound. Michelle described how the doctor took his time and then got very quiet. Then he layed down the scope and looked at them: “There’s nothing we can do; he’s not going to live. We can take you over and induce labor now, or you can wait and let nature take its course — but he will die.” The combination of Down syndrome and fetal hydrops, a life-threatening build-up of fluid in the tissue around the lungs, heart and abdomen, was always fatal, he told them. 

So Michelle and her husband went to see their parish priest and began planning the Funeral for their unborn child. But once they got home Daniel had an idea. Since they were both kids they had known the Knights of Columbus and had heard of their founder, Father Michael McGivney. They knew he had been declared venerable and needed a miracle to be beatified. 

“We emailed hundreds of people asking them to pray to Father McGivney for him,” Daniel later said. After all, he recalled, “Father McGivney needed a miracle to be named ‘Blessed,’ and there’s no reason it can’t be our son…He needs a miracle; we need a healing — let’s go get it.”

And they prayed in a very particular way: not for the Down syndrome to disappear.  “we welcomed that as a gift,” Daniel later said, “We simply prayed to Father McGivney “Save our baby.”

To the amazement of the doctors, the hydrops disappeared and Michael was born on May 15, 2015, the same day that the first Council of the Knights of Columbus had been founded some 123 years before.

Father McGivney loved his people. And he evidently still does, even those not yet born. For he would have agreed with our Holy Father, Francis, who wrote in his Encyclical letter Gaudete et Exsultate:

“Our defense of the innocent unborn…needs to be clear, firm, and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development.”

The Holy Father goes on:

“Equally sacred…are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”

Father McGivney would have agreed with that too: Especially that year when he was in Seminary in Quebec and his father died, leaving his poor mother with six hungry mouths to feed. So he left Seminary for two years and got a job to feed and clothe and house his siblings. For he had learned that the lives of the poor and the destitute were sacred, beginning with his own family.

And he would apply that lesson years later when scores of families in his parish lost their fathers to the small pox and other diseases in the crowded Irish neighborhoods of his parish. Their children, I imagine, must have looked an awful lot like his hungry brothers and sisters had years before. Which is why he founded the Knights of Columbus, as a fraternal society providing death benefits to poor Catholic families.

He founded the Knights, he later wrote, on the principles of unity and charity: unity, he wrote, in order to gain the strength to be charitable.”

Charitable to all, and especially the ones whom everyone else had rejected, as when he refused to abandon the young James “Chip” Smith, who was sentenced to death for killing the police chief. 

Five days before the execution date, Father McGivney celebrated a Mass for James in his jail cell. And when he emerged there was a crowd outside, waiting to hear what happened. He told the gathered throng: “I am requested by Mr. Smith to ask pardon for all faults he may have had and all offenses he may have committed, and at his request I ask for the prayers of all of you, that when next Friday comes he may die a holy death.” 

Then he asked everyone to pray for those who would be there with James on the day of his execution, later writing: “To me this duty comes with almost a crushing weight. If I could consistently with my duty be far away from here next Friday, I should escape perhaps the most trying ordeal of my life, but this sad duty is placed my way by Providence and must be fulfilled.”

Father McGivney understood the sanctity of every life, and he understood it throughout the years he walked the Irish slums of his parish, especially the half dozen years they were were hit with smallpox. And in his final year, it got even worse with an influenza epidemic killing one out of ten of his parishioners.

Maybe it was during a Funeral that he caught it, or maybe in one of his trips to a sick parishioner’s house. No one really knows. But the thirty-eight year old priest died of pneumonia on the 14th of August 130 years ago.

And on that day, the Church now proclaims, young Father Michael was welcomed to the mountain of the LORD of hosts, where “the veil that veils all peoples” and “the web that is woven over all nations” has been destroyed. He was welcomed to that place where “the Lord will wipe away the tears from every face” and they will “rejoice and be glad” in his presence forever.

So let us pray with Father Michael McGiveney:

for every child in his or her mother’s womb: that they might be protected and defended from all harm;

for every little child in our church and in out country: that we might cherish and protect them, that they might thrive in safety and joy;

for every mother too poor to feed her children, or every father too impoverished to put a roof over their heads;

for those we threw away: for the abandoned, the homeless, the underprivileged, the handicapped and those who are different from us: that we might seek them out and welcome them home;

for the vulnerable elderly and the infirm: that we might thank God for their lives, their wisdom and their infinite value;

for the victims of human trafficking: that we might work to free them from those who would use and abuse them as commodities to be traded and not cherish them as sacred gifts from a loving God;

and for all who are rejected, forgotten or alone, that we might love them with the love of Christ, and lay down our lives for them.

Let us pray with Father McGivney, in the words of Pope Saint John Paul II, that heaven might look down on                ‘babies not allowed to be born, 

on the poor whose lives are intolerable, 

on victims of brutal violence, 

and on the elderly and the sick…

‘that we might defend them,

by proclaiming the Gospel of Life 

with honesty and love.’  Amen.

A Prayer for President Trump

God of mercy and compassion:
look upon our President;
Support him with your power,
comfort him with your protection,
and keep him in your tender care.

Bless our country in this time of trial.
Make us good and true:
that we might proclaim the truth,
discern your will
and carry out your commands.

We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

On Government and Virtue: A Homily

In April of 1776, John Adams, responding to a request from the North Carolina Colonial Assembly, sent a letter of advice on how to form a government. Constitutional scholars remark at Adams’ invention in this letter of three branches of government and other elements which twelve years later would end up in the Constitution of the United States of America.

But perhaps most remarkable was not his description of what our nation should look like, but why it should be a nation at all. For the purpose of government, he insisted, is the happiness of its people; and the source of that happiness, he wrote, “consists in virtue.” Government governs best, Adams argued, when it makes its citizens virtuous.

The first Catholic Bishop of these United States reiterated Adam’s view in his Prayer for the New Government some fifteen years later. Archbishop John Carroll (whose brother signed the Declaration of Independence) prayed that President Washington conduct the nation’s business with “righteousness,” and this, he went on, was how he was to do it: “by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion; by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy; and by restraining vice and immorality.”

Indeed, in the farewell address of the first President of the United States in 1797, he too declared that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are the indispensable supports.”

So it is that many of our founding fathers saw the pursuit of virtue as the foundation of the American experiment in self government. For as Adams elsewhere reflects: fear is the foundation of the governments of kings and despots, but this new American nation has been founded for the pursuit of happiness, and the virtue which makes it possible.

So what is this virtue on which we have been founded? The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it as "a habitual and firm disposition to do the good,” a disposition best lived out in faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.

Likewise, Saint Paul defines virtue today in his spiritual testament, written from a jail cell in Rome, shortly before he was martyred for the faith. In this remarkable letter to the Phillipians, our patron defines virtue as imitation of Christ, counseling his readers to “do nothing out of selfishness or vainglory; but rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but also for those of others.”

He calls us to imitate Christ, who the night before he died for us “lays aside his garments and girds himself with a towel, who bends down to wash the Apostles’ feet and asks them: ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.’”

And then he opens his arms on a Cross, out of love for us in our sinfulness, empties himself and takes on the form of a slave, obedient unto death

Saint Eusebius of Caesarea put it another way: “[Christ] took upon himself the labors of the suffering members, and made our sicknesses his and suffered on our account all our woes and labors by the laws of love, in conformity with his great love for humanity.”3

So if Adams and Washington and Archbishop Carroll are right, and the foundation of American government and the American way of life is virtue, then the foundation of the American way of life and of this nation is to be like Christ. And our greatness may be found not in how many towers of Babel we might build to show how great we are, nor in how many nations or empires we can conquer to show how powerful we are. No...our greatness lies in our goodness and in our capacity to be the shining city on the hill, the nation who is good and true, with liberty and justice for all.

They understood that in the House of Representatives that night when they gathered in the presence of President and Mrs. Lincoln to honor the Christian Commission, a voluntary association of religious organizations which provided medical and chaplaincy services to Union troops. Preachers spoke, and so did Congressmen and other important representatives of the Federal Government. The talks went on and on.

But when the twenty-seven year old Chaplain Charles C. McCabe came to the lectern something happened.

Only the year before, McCabe explained, he has been captured by Confederate forces and was imprisoned with other Union troops in Richmond. He told of the night in Libby Prison when they heard of the Union Victory at Gettysburg, and how he led the Union soldiers in singing a song he had ripped out of the Atlantic Monthly, written by the poet and anti-slavery activist Julia Ward Howe three years earlier. And so he sang it for all these big and important people.

According to one paper: “Applause greeted the ending of nearly every stanza,” and the President asked that he sing it again. The papers told of tears running down Lincoln’s face, especially as the young McCabe sang the last verse:

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave, He is wisdom to the mighty,
He is succor to the brave,
So the world shall be his footstool,

and the soul of time his slave, Our God is marching on.

One last story:

In 1783, following the end of the Revolutionary War and the birth of this republic, George Washington gave up command of the Continental Army. Yet despite the victory, it was a time of great uncertainty and dissension, and it would be five years until Washington would become our first President.

And so it was from Newburgh, New York, where a few months before he had put down a mutiny by some of his former soldiers, the former commander-in-chief wrote to the Governors of the fledgling states with advice on the road ahead. He concluded his letter with a prayer, which should be hours as well:

“that God would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without which, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

On Envy and Being a Daisy

The Lord speaks to us through the Prophet Isaiah:

“my thoughts are not your thoughts,

nor are your ways my ways…

As high as the heavens are above the earth,

so high are my ways above your ways

and my thoughts above your thoughts.”

Who is God? Totally, completely and unalterably.  Who is God?

God is love, we are told by John the Apostle in his first letter.  In fact he says it twice and the Greek is unambiguous: “O THEOS AGAPE ESTIN.” “God is love.”

If God, then, is love, we, his creatures, made in his image and likeness, are made for love: a love that is patient and kind; not jealous or pompous, rude or quick to judge A love which , in the words of Saint Paul, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” A love that bleeds every drop for love of the beloved, that dies that we might live, and suffers that we might be redeemed.

But, sadly, our love is seldom so boundless, and our ways seldom so loving. Too often, we are the grumbling workers, resenting those who seem to have what we want: “These last ones worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us, who bore the day’s burden and the heat,’ jealous of God’s goodness to our brothers, consumed by what Shakespeare called the “green eyed monster” of envy.

Pope Francis speaks eloquently about this “worm of jealously and envy,” that turns hearts bitter heart and makes these unhappy hearts pump vinegar instead of blood.  Such hearts are the cause of violence, conflict and discord.  The Holy Father goes on, “War does not begin on the battlefield: war begins in the heart, with this misunderstanding, division, envy, with this fighting with each other.”

Sometimes, we too are jealous, you and I.  Lotsa times, we are jealous.  “Who does she think she is?”  “Mrs. Astor on her high horse?”  “God’s gift to mankind?” And him! “The King of the world?” “God Almighty?” “The know-it-all!”

And God looks at us with a patient smile and says:

“What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? Am I not free to do as I wish with my own mercy? Are you envious because I am generous?’ Is your love so little, so miserly and so grasping that you cannot understand my love for the lost, the forgotten and even the sinner?  Is your love so small, that you cannot accept my love for you?”

And there God is right. I seldom understand how much he loves me. Me, as I am, in all my messiness.  Not me the the super hero. But me, in all my littleness and in all the ways that I am not like those well paid laborers, the ones to whom he gives all the talents, the good looks and the fame.

Indeed, the more I accept the lot which God has chosen for me, and stop envying the life of the glamorous others, the more I accept his love, and the more I know, in the words of Saint James, the wisdom which is from above, “pure, peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without inconstancy or insincerity.”

And when we accept where God wants us to be, envy drops away and we finally realize that happiness and holiness is not about doing great things, but in surrendering to God’s will, so that he can do with me what he will, in all things, great or small.

Saint Therese of Lisieux said it best:

“Our Lord has explained this mystery to me. He showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtime beauty, and the fields would not longer be enameled with lovely colors. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but he has also created little ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at his feet, and whose mission it is to gladden his Divine Eyes when he looks down upon them. And the more gladly they do his will the greater their perfection.”

So there is the great secret: if we make our ways God’s ways, and if our love is like unto his, we need only surrender to his will and be glad that he made us a daisy.