Author: DVO

There’s a well-known marble quarry in our area. Recently, we went over for their annual festival, where sculptors spent a week working on a piece of stone. One artist was sculpting a complicated knotted figure. He explained how he spent time with the stone, studying and almost “listening” to it, learning how to work with it. If he imposed his will upon the stone, he risked destroying it. Today’s Gospel shows Jesus driving the unclean spirit from the Gerasene demoniac. The people of Gerasene experienced God’s grace, the healing of a profoundly tormented man. But they didn’t get it or perhaps didn’t want to. They had their own narrative. Jesus didn’t fit, and so they turned from him. We must wonder what moments of God’s creative grace and healing we miss when we see life simply as a chance to work out our own agenda instead of responding to the present moment. Though God typically lets the universe run according to its natural rhythms and patterns, what is to prevent God from shaping it and influencing it occasionally in remarkable ways to signal his purpose and presence? Jesus, open my heart to your presence here and now.

Our Gospel verse from Mark describes Jesus arriving at Capernaum, where he enters the synagogue on the Sabbath and begins to teach. Bishop Barron writes: “The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.” The ordinary teachers would have appealed to their own teachers and authorities and, finally, to Moses and the Torah, which were unassailable. What would prevent the people from saying he was just crazy? Well, watch what happens next. Into the synagogue, there rushed a man with “an unclean spirit.” And he knows who Jesus is: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But then Jesus demonstrates his authority: “‘Quiet, come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit convulsed him with a loud cry and came out of him.” The claim to God’s own authority is now ratified by showing power over the spiritual realm. Dr. Mary Healy writes that for Mark, evil is not an impersonal force but is concentrated in invisible, malevolent beings who are bent on destroying human beings and hindering God’s plan of salvation. These evil spirits are responsible for various mental and even physical disorders. The Church has always taught that demons are real spiritual beings, fallen angels who were created by God but became evil by their own free choice. Anyone tempted to dismiss accounts of demons as fables does not have to look far to see evidence of their influence today. Such phenomena as “racial cleansing,” group suicides, and the sexual abuse of children show more than merely human malice at work, seeking to destroy the image of God in man. But as frightening and real as the power of demons is, the authority of Christ is infinitely superior. Through his cross and resurrection, Christ definitively conquered the powers of hell. For the present time, however, their malicious actions are permitted by God, who can work good out of every evil.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke describe Jesus calming a raging storm with His disciples, as does our passage from Mark’s Gospel today. This story exemplifies how Jesus’ disciples were just like you and me. They saw Jesus perform countless miracles and walked with Him day to day, but they still found it hard to believe that Christ would not let them drown. When Jesus rebuked their lack of faith, by extension, He also rebuked our lack of faith. We face many storms in our daily lives, yet we often fail to acknowledge that the Lord can calm us during these storms. He is with us and is happy to bring us peace and comfort. Do you know the de profundis prayer from Psalm 130? “Out of the depths, I have cried to you, O Lord. O Lord, be attentive to the voice of my pleading.” It is the prayer we should offer at the darkest times of life, when we find ourselves lost and in the shadow of death, when, in our desperation, we feel utterly incapable of helping ourselves. What calms the storm in life is not that all of our problems suddenly disappear but that, within them, we realize that because God is still in charge, all will be well: illness, financial loss, painful relationships, lost jobs, loneliness, and the shadow of death itself notwithstanding. All will be well because, even asleep with his head on a cushion, God is still Lord.

Does the mustard seed realize what it is destined to become? In the familiar parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” From such a small, seemingly insignificant start grows “the largest of plants,” with branches attracting birds of the sky. Deacon Greg Kandra writes that it’s all so improbable. Let’s face it: the mustard seed is so tiny that most of us would easily overlook it. But it holds something tantalizing; a tiny grain contains growth, life, shelter, and shade. Its future is vast—a story aching to be told, a purpose waiting to be fulfilled. How often do we forget that? And how often we fail to understand this simple but humbling reality: life is full of mustard seeds. We share the world with so many who are easily neglected, abandoned, and swept away: the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the lonely, and the unborn. But Jesus assures us that every seed, even the smallest, contains possibility and purpose. Hold a seed in your hand, and you’re holding an unwritten future. We can’t begin to imagine what will come. Faith is like that. God’s kingdom is like that. It’s a place where even those who feel small and forgotten are given the grace to grow. We become more than we ever thought possible. In this way, we are all mustard seeds. Do we realize what we can become?

A beautiful story today of what I have come to embrace about the conversion of Paul is what Fr. Michael Rubeling refers to as Paul’s “everyman” nature. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul refers to his own conversion “as to one born abnormally.” Paul was not one of the Apostles who walked, ate, and slept with Jesus. Like Christians today, he came to know the resurrected Jesus through a conversion. The Early Church Father Origen speaks to this similar nature: “Many have come to Christianity as if against their will, for a certain spirit, appearing to them, in sleep or when they are awake, suddenly silences their mind, and they change from hating the Word to dying for him.” The divine voice in Paul’s conversion orders him to get up from the ground, and the future apostle of the Gentiles obeys immediately. The physical movement of getting up is a kind of symbol of the spiritual uplift God’s call gives his soul. Bishop Robert Barron brings another aspect of this conversion into view. Paul waited three years to visit with Peter and the other Apostles. Bishop Barron thinks that during this period, Paul was “trying to reconcile his encounter with Jesus and the traditions of Israel that he loved.” Many in Israel expected a Messiah, but theirs was an “avenging military and political ruler like Solomon or David or a great lawgiver and leader like Moses. What Paul saw in Jesus was someone greater than Moses, Solomon, or David—and someone wholly unexpected.” Paul’s conversion is an outstanding example of what divine grace and divine assistance in general can affect in a person’s heart.

Scientists tell us that every second, inside the sun, the equivalent of 4 million elephants are being transformed into light, an irretrievable, one-time gift. The sun is giving itself away. If this generosity should halt, all energy would eventually lose its source, and everything would die and become inert. We, and everything on our planet, live because of the sun’s generosity. Fr. Rolheiser writes that in this generosity, the sun reflects the abundance of God. This largesse also invites us to be generous, to have big hearts, to risk giving ourselves away in self-sacrifice, and to witness God’s abundance. In the biblical parable of the Sower, Jesus describes God as not a calculating person who sows his grain carefully and discriminately only into worthy soil. This Sower scatters seeds indiscriminately everywhere: on the road, in the bushes, in the rocks, into barren soil, and into good soil. It seems he has unlimited seeds, so he works from a generous sense of abundance rather than from a guarded sense of scarcity. From everything we can see, God is so rich in love and mercy that he can afford to be wasteful, over-generous, non-calculating, non-discriminating, incredibly risk-taking, and big-hearted beyond our imaginations. Jesus assures us that the measure we measure out is the measure that we will receive in return. Essentially, that says that the air we breathe out will be the air we re-inhale. That isn’t just true ecologically. It is a broad truth for life in general. If we breathe out miserliness, we will re-inhale miserliness; if we breathe out pettiness, we will breathe in pettiness; if we breathe out bitterness, then bitterness will be the air that surrounds us; and if we breathe out a sense of scarcity that makes us calculate and be fearful, then calculation and fearfulness will be the air we re-inhale. But, if we are aware of God’s abundance, we breathe out generosity and forgiveness; we will breathe in the air of generosity and forgiveness. We re-inhale what we exhale.

In today’s Gospel verse, Jesus identifies us as his disciples. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that when we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is evident that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who regularly participate in church life and accept the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. But we must be careful in how we understand this. This does not mean there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. There were centuries in church history where Christian spirituality suffered from this misunderstanding, where it was common to think that monks, nuns, contemplatives, priests, and other such people were called to live the full gospel. In contrast, others were exempt from the more demanding of Jesus’ invitations—no such exemptions. The church may never be divided into the perfect and less perfect, the better and the half-baked, full-participation and partial-participation. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less. Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit there are levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation. Still, something akin to this forever happens, analogous to what occurs in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep they will go, and some go deeper than others, though ideally, everyone is meant to go its full depth. And, given human history and human freedom, this is not surprising. There will always be a significant variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has our own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed. So, we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole, and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do. Hence, religiously, nobody can be expected to respond to something entirely outside their sphere of possibility, so we will inevitably gather around Jesus in very different ways, depending upon our capacity to see and give ourselves over. Jesus, it seemed, was okay with that. In his view, there was no such category as a cafeteria disciple or a disciple light. In our understanding, there shouldn’t be such categories either.

In his article “Splitting the Inner Atom,” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we can never be challenged too strongly about social justice. A key, non-negotiable component of the gospel is the summons to reach out to the poor, the excluded, and those whom society deems expendable. It’s all too easy to conclude that, given the mega-problems of our world, it doesn’t matter much how we live in the deeper recesses of our private worlds as long as we are doing the correct battle on the big front. Do we believe that God cares much whether or not we say our morning prayers, gossip about a colleague, reconcile with someone over a petty dispute, or keep our sexual lives fully in line with the biblical ideal? Does God really care about these things? Yes. God cares because we care. Significant, global issues notwithstanding, issues of personal integrity are generally what make or break our happiness, not to mention our character and our intimate relationships. In the end, they aren’t petty concerns at all. They shape the big things. Social morality is simply a reflection of private morality. What we see in the global picture merely magnifies the human heart. Thomas Merton said when you change a heart, “you have helped bring about some permanent structural, moral change on this planet.” Everything else is simply one power attempting to displace another. Private morality and all that comes with it – private prayer and the attempt to be honest and transparent in even the most minor and most secret things – is the core of all morality. Private morality is not unimportant, an unaffordable luxury, a soft virtue, or something that stands in the way of commitment to social justice. It’s the actual place where the moral atom needs to be split.

“Repent and believe in the gospel.” The Good News is him. So now it’s time to make a decision. Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel writes that we should set out without a road map to discover God, knowing that the way is sure and has no end. Don’t try to find him through new techniques but let yourself be formed by him in the poverty of a banal life. Monotony is a kind of poverty: accept it. Don’t look for beautiful trips in your imagination. May the varieties of the Kingdom of God suffice for you and bring you joy. Don’t be overly concerned about your life because to be that concerned is a kind of wealth: then old age will speak to you of birth and death of resurrection. Time will seem to you like a small fold in the vastness of eternity you will judge everything in the light of the eternal.

When stripped of everything, you can only see in the world an unfinished house and in yourself total poverty with no façade; think of those shadowy eyes open in the center of your soul and fixed on things that are beyond words, for the Kingdom of heaven is yours.

In the book “Essential Spiritual Writings” by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, this parable from G.K. Chesterton offers a lot of food for thought: “A man who was entirely careless of spiritual affairs died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded. His priest also went and argued: ‘He was not really a bad fellow; given time, he would have matured. Let him out, please!’ The gates remained stubbornly shut against all their voices. Finally, his mother came; she did not beg for his release. Quietly and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan: ‘Let me in.’ Immediately, the great door swung open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell, and there redeems the dead.” Monsignor Ellsworth Walden writes that Jesus came into our world, knocking at the door of every heart, seeking to embrace us with His unconditional love. While He made a great impact, His seeking and knocking on hearts is still a work in progress. Not everyone opened their hearts to Him. He faced the wrath of hell as He endured rejection and His passion and death on the cross. Yet even there, He kept seeking and knocking. All He had to gain was every person who responded with humble faith and joy for eternity. Jesus does not wait for us to be perfect; he loves us as we are now. That puts the ball in our court. How wide do we open the door of our hearts to Him? Is prayer a nourishing, hopeful time every day, or is it just another thing to check off the list of things to do? Is Sunday Mass an uplifting, life-giving experience, or is it just another thing to check off for a routine Sunday? There is nothing routine about Jesus and His love for us. We can ignore Him and His love and become blasé and indifferent. But as much as we try and test His love, He will never give up.