A Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Bizarre Time
Readings: Wisdom 18:6-9 Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19 Luke 12:32-48
We are inclined to shellac our saints, which might be inevitable once we put them on a pedestal. It will not be that they don’t deserve the peak; it’s that, from down here, they’re harder to see of their entirety.
Because they were themselves sentinels, taking one other have a look at the saints might help us reply to this command of the Lord:
Gird your loins and lightweight your lamps
and be like servants who await their master’s return from a marriage,
able to open immediately when he comes and knocks (Lk 12:35-36).
The church has at all times seen three senses on this passage of Scripture and in others prefer it that talk of vigilance. The primary is cosmic in scope. History will close in Christ. The second couldn’t be more particular. Our own stories have a final chapter, and, for all we all know, we could also be writing them now. And the third is much more pressing! It concerns who Christ is on this age of the Holy Spirit. He’s the one who gave himself to us and continues to achieve this if we’re able to receive him.
God is usually most modern to us when God seems most absent. You can be at peace, and never desire God so, if the Lord weren’t in your life.
For those who read them, a lot of our saints write of God coming to us in what is likely to be called “a burning absence.” It was St. Augustine who first identified that we will only burn with desire for God, chafe at God’s absence in our each day life, when we’ve got already seen, or felt, something of God. So, paradoxically, God is usually most modern to us when God seems most absent. Put one other way, you can be at peace, and never desire God so, if the Lord weren’t in your life. Our deep craving for God is the primary sign of God’s presence in our life.
Here is how Augustine put it in his Confessions:
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so latest. Late have I loved you! Lo, you were inside, but I outside, in search of there for you, and upon the shapely things you’ve gotten made I rushed headlong, I, misshapen. You were with me, but I used to be not with you. They held me back removed from you, those things which might haven’t any being were they not in you. You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned to your peace.
To see this play out within the lifetime of a saint—one whom we, sadly, seldom let step down from her pedestal—consider this passage from St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She desired to enter religious life long before it could have been proper. When her local Carmelite convent denied her premature request, her beloved father took her on a pilgrimage to Rome to comfort her.
For those who feel a eager for God, take heart. You might be alert and able to receive the bridegroom. For those who weren’t, his absence wouldn’t burn.
It didn’t. She felt abandoned by the church and by the God who had previously been so present to her. Yet what this young woman, who died at age 24, wrote of this time reveals why she will not be only a saint but in addition a health care provider of the church. Who else could understand that the aim of prayer will not be our pleasure, not even our directly experienced success? No. It’s to put ourselves before the Lord, to supply ourselves to him as he gave himself to us. Only 14 on the time, Thérèse rereads her abandonment as God’s amusement.
I had offered myself, for a while now, to the Child Jesus as His little plaything. I told Him not to make use of me as a priceless toy children are content to take a look at but dare not touch, but to make use of me like a bit of ball of no value which He could throw on the bottom, push with His foot, pierce, leave in a corner, or press to His heart if it pleased Him; in a word, I desired to amuse little Jesus, to provide Him pleasure; I wanted to provide myself as much as His childish whims. He heard my prayer.
At Rome, Jesus pierced His little plaything; He desired to see what there was inside it and having seen, content with His discovery, He let His little ball fall to the bottom and He went off to sleep. What did He do during His gentle sleep and what became of the little abandoned ball? Jesus dreamed He was still fidgeting with His toy, leaving it and taking it up in turns, after which having seen it roll quite far He pressed it to His heart, not allowing it to ever go removed from His little hand.
We may indeed find great comfort in prayer, however it is greater than that. For those who faithfully pursue prayer, it should pass beyond consolation. Why? Because prayer is a give up, a giving of ourselves to God.
Christ’s soul was not suffused with comfort when he died on the cross. Ours may or will not be this manner after we come to prayer, which is why that other great Carmelite doctor, St. Teresa of Ávila, suggested that a few of our most fruitful prayers are people who seem the driest. They’re the purer offering to God. She ridiculed those that can produce comforting prayer experiences on demand.
It shouldn’t be thought that he who suffers isn’t praying, for he’s offering this to God. And infrequently he’s praying rather more than the one who’s breaking his head in solitude, pondering that if he has squeezed out some tears he’s thereby praying.
If we wander from God, we dull the need for the Lord written into our hearts. They change into lost within the waves of the world, they usually don’t experience a burning absence of God. For those who feel a eager for God, take heart. You might be alert and able to receive the bridegroom. For those who weren’t, his absence wouldn’t burn.
