October 13 2013

Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing. ― Linda Hogan

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Faith, Leprosy, and the fear of the outsider

The ancient world was terrified of leprosy, which is a contagious disease, and having no cure for it they banished lepers from society. Lepers became outcasts, required by the law to stand at a distance from people, and to shout ‘Unclean, unclean!’ when they saw anyone near (Leviticus 13:45f). The Samaritan leper in this story was doubly isolated, for there was deep religious hatred between Jews and Samaritans.

These ten outcasts must have heard of Jesus’ reputation and they are desperate for help. They kept their distance, as Jewish Law required, and they shouted, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’

Every society, every group, has outsiders. How a group sees and treats outsiders is the clearest indicator of the values the group is based on. “We must face that fact,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “that every society is based upon intolerance.” But to say this is to discount the possibility of an open society. To be sure, the open society has many enemies, ancient and modern, as Karl Popper’s classic (1945) made clear. We might expect that all religious societies, since they claim to be in the service of God, would be open societies; but some of them shrink into cults, and many develop cult-like qualities. There is always a match between inner and outer. If the outsider is regarded only as an enemy, then we can be sure that the inner life is diseased is some way. This is how we estimate the life of an individual; it is also how we can estimate the life of a society. An individual who only knows who he or she is against has no positive identity at all; likewise a society. The greatest tragedy for disciples of the one who said, ‘Love your enemies’ is that they make their own identity depend on the very existence of enemies. Inevitably they will have no heart for “the weak, the sick, the wounded, the strayed, the lost” (see Ezekiel 34). They will be without the quality of mercy. The isolated, the doubly isolated, will get no hearing from them.

A Christian society that is deaf to the outsider and that marginalises some of its own, can hardly be described as Christian. Pope Francis, in his very first week as pope, spoke about a tendency in the Church to “self-referencing.” A Christian community of any kind is not a group of likeminded people who confirm one another in their narrowness, but a group that reaches out to those whose lives are in chaos, whose voices are not heard, whose presence is not welcomed.

The only leper who came back to give thanks to God was the Samaritan, the doubly isolated. That was a poor reflection on the nine. Today’s gospel reading is a call for us to think about how we relate to our Church, our groups, our family…and to outsiders. We can have a subtly hostile attitude to all outsiders, and we are even capable of making outsiders of some within. Jews despised Samaria as a blot on their country. We need to realise the significance of the fact that Jesus reached out to Samaritans, went into the heart of Samaria (John 4), and even made Samaritans the heroes of some of his parables. He even had the word ‘Samaritan’ thrown at him as an insult by people who considered themselves insiders (John 8:48).

-- from Today’s Good News, the Dominicans of Ireland

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________Reflection for October 13, 2013: Life in a fallow season

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

That’s from a poem by Theodore Roethke, one that he wrote several decades ago, not long before his own life exploded in mental illness and death. Roethke was one of those turbulent God-haunted poets who know an awful lot about darkness and pain, but know as well about the bolts of light – and love – that come from God when we least expect it. Now in October, as the days get shorter and the leaves come fluttering brightly down, it’s a good time for us to begin to try to see, despite the darkness. It’s time for us to look inside our own God-haunted and sinful and loving human hearts. Before we know it, Advent will be here – that shadowy, thoughtful, candlelit season. Now, right now, is a good time to think about the shadows hidden in our lives: and to do our best – with the help of God – to accept and learn from what is waiting in that darkness. We will never try to light our candles, unless we first accept that it’s dark down here, and we really need a little more light to see by – unless we acknowledge that even more or less upright, well-meaning and decent people like us are also, always, people who are dwelling in darkness, in need of the light of Christ.

Autumn is, after all, the fallow season, and all kinds of seeds are hidden and waiting to grow deep underground, often buried in places where you least expect them to flourish. Perhaps we can learn from the farmers in our valley -- learn to become wise gardeners and stewards of our own spiritual acres.

The big sunflowers in my back yard have long since dropped their silvery seeds. It must be scary to be a sunflower seed: to leave the great big flower head that once was your home, and fall away, utterly unknown, after a life spent packed together with a multitude of seeds – it must seem like forever when you lose your hold on the mother plant and fall away from the sun and the air and all your fellow seeds. And who know what will happen next? You might be eaten by birds or rodents, or else be buried deep underneath the snow – abandoned, it would seem, to die deep inside the cold darkness of the earth. I’m sure if you tried to explain to a seed that this seeming death and burial is really the prelude to a glorious resurrection – that if it endures through the cold dark winter, it will waken in spring as a glorious flower itself. Likely story, the seed would say. As if anything like that is remotely possible. I suspect that if seeds could speak, they’d object to the whole arrangement – all this complicated scary business of getting planted and buried in the dark cool dirt, far away from the light -- they might look at each other and shrug and say to the gardener: Thanks all the same, but I’d just as soon stay a seed, safe inside the bag. Go plant somebody else, and leave me alone!

I suppose everything we produce is a kind of seed – all our thoughts and ideas and words and prayers and deeds. And the earth of human existence is certainly, at least in theory, a deep and fertile place, rich in potential. But God knows it can also get dark and cold down here, and the sprouting process is tough – especially for the kind of ideas that challenge and sometimes change a life. I don’t know how it is for seeds, but in my experience, it usually hurts to grow as a person. That’s why people say what they do about really rotten experiences: “I know it’s tough, but it’s a learning experience. It’s all educational; it’s the kind of thing that people need to go through, in order to strengthen their character.” Don’t you just hate that kind of challenging, educational experience? I’ve gone through a few myself, and frankly I found them really, really unpleasant. I’d just as soon my character stayed nice and wimpy and undeveloped, like one of those guys in those old muscle-building ads, the one who gets sand kicked in his face by the resident bully. Unfortunately, however, life is the resident bully that kicks whole buckets full of sand, sometimes even rocks, into our faces, and we’re stuck down here on this beach with this bully, with no way to escape. In the old magazine ads, the 98-pound weakling does a few easy exercises and turns himself instantly into a big strong muscle-bound man. In real life, building up muscles takes a lot more effort and time. Especially when it comes to the muscles of the spirit. That’s why the Eastern Christians call their saintliest monks the “Spiritual Athletes of Prayer.” They accept that it takes a lot of hard work to become a holy person.

But then again, anything worth doing usually takes a lot of work. And there’s no better time than the present to work on becoming a holier person. As the leaves come down, we are entering the quiet, interior, fallow season. Before we know it, Advent will be here, and it will be time for us to open our hearts and lives for the coming of Jesus. Shouldn’t we be doing our part, right now, to prepare the soil inside us?

I know a lot of us are struggling these days – wrestling with troubles in our finances and jobs and health and families; caught – once again -- in the middle of an angry and fearful and polarized nation; on different sides of political battles, and members of a church that is as complex and human and fallible as we are ourselves. But however divided we might seem, we are in the same boat here. Or better yet, we are all seeds planted together in the same mysterious garden. And there is so much we don’t understand, and sometimes the pain and the darkness can fill us with fear and make us despair. But if there’s anything a person learns over time, it’s that one saying is true: It’s always going to be darkest before the dawn. Maybe we can use our own dark times, our own fallow seasons, to nourish what we plant in our soul’s soil, and help each other, like spiritual gardeners, to sprout and begin to grow strong. Maybe we can grow into better and kinder and more loving and compassionate people; maybe, together, we can work to make a better church, and a better nation, and a better world. In Jesus’ name. – Diane Sylvain

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BONUS: Catholic writer NANCY MAIRS on living with MS:

I learned that one never finishes adjusting to MS. I don’t know now why I thought one would. One does not, after all, finish adjusting to life, and MS is simply a fact of my life—not my favorite fact, of course—but as ordinary as my nose and my tropical fish and my yellow Mazda station wagon. It may at any time get worse, but no amount of worry or anticipation can prepare me for a new loss. My life is a lesson in losses. I learn one at a time.

And I had best be patient in the learning, since I’ll have to do it like it or not. …

This gentleness [my illness has taught me] is part of the reason that I’m not sorry to be a cripple. I didn’t have it before. Perhaps I’d have developed it anyway—how could I know such a thing?—and I wish I had more of it, but I’m glad of what I have. It has opened and enriched my life enormously. This sense that my frailty and need must be mirrored in others, that in searching for and shaping a stable core in a life wrenched by change and loss, change and loss, I must recognize the same process, under individual conditions, in the lives around me. I do not deprecate such knowledge, however I’ve come by it.

All the same, if a cure were found, would I take it? In a minute. I may be a cripple, but I’m only occasionally a loony and never a saint. Anyway, in my brand of theology God doesn’t give bonus points for a limp. I’d take a cure; I just don’t need one. A friend who also has MS startled me once by asking, “Do you ever say to yourself, ‘Why me, Lord?”’ “No, Michael, I don’t,” I told him, “because whenever I try, the only response I can think of is ‘Why not?”’ If I could make a cosmic deal, whom would I put in my place? What in my life would I give up in exchange for sound limbs and a thrilling rush of energy? No one. Nothing. I might as well do the job myself. Now that I’m getting the hang of it. – Nancy Mairs, from On Being a Cripple