Living With Lamps Lit
(1 Thess 4:1-8; Ps 97; Mt 25:1-13)
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Recently, after years of burning messy candles, we noticed an oil lamp sitting on a side table in our chapel. We filled it with oil, held a match to it and voila! – it lit up and has been burning brightly for us ever since.
This small oil lamp and the readings today invite us to live in the Spirit through faith, prayer and love that is pure, single-minded and selfless.
The five wise bridesmaids in the gospel were ready with lamps full of oil and lit. They had lamps of faith full with the oil of the Holy Spirit, wicks of an intimate life of prayer and the flame of an active love. Jesus presents them to us in this parable about the reign of God as a model for us to do the same.
The ten bridesmaids
The five foolish bridesmaids had some faith for they also had lamps, but their lamps were empty, signifying a religion made up of outward appearances and rituals, but lacking the oil of the Holy Spirit in their lives. Without that indwelling Spirit, their wick of a prayer life was also very much dormant, and thus they had no flame of love in their lives either. They were not living in the reign of God, which is the goal of our lives, and found themselves excluded.
St Paul in the first reading warns against being like the foolish bridesmaids specifically in the area of human sexuality. For him, our lamp is the will of God. The oil is still the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. The wick becomes our sanctification or healing. We are to let go of lustful passions, and never, ever wrong, abuse, exploit or take advantage of another in the area of human sexuality. Our flame will, for St Paul, become holiness and purity of heart, a single-minded focus on doing only the will of God.
These words of St Paul could not be more appropriate, and even seem to have been written with our society in mind, riddled as it is with addiction to pornography, human trafficking for sexual purposes, sexual abuse in and out of the church, blatant promiscuity, lack of life-time commitment in marriage, and now even an emerging hook-up culture of convenient sex without responsibility.
Human sexuality is such a beautiful, precious gift that comes with one critical condition – it is meant to be used according to the will of God. It is also a powerful gift, because we are made in the image and likeness of God. In Genesis, God proclaims, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26) The plural language is not just an Old Testament glimpse of God as a Trinity of persons. The only people who use that kind of language today are kings or queens (and perhaps popes). It is royal language, applied to our human sexuality.
Couple on beach at Galveston, TX
When we are born, the first question asked is always, “Is it a boy or a girl?” That is a question about gender, human sexuality, maleness and femaleness. God can hold that tension together, but we cannot. We are born in Imago Dei, the image of God, yet we are either male or female. That creates within us an incompletion, a longing for wholeness, for consummation. And that is a divine fire that is within us – a powerful energy that is God-given but safe and sacred only within the container of marital commitment and selfless love.
Outside of that safe container, it is dangerous, too powerful for us and can and does burn us. That is why God would say to Moses that he could not see the face of God – that would be like touching a high voltage electric wire. That is why pornography is so dangerous – it is trying to see the face of God the wrong way, like touching an energy too powerful for us that will burn us, addict us and eventually destroy us.
This reality is called a spirituality of human incompleteness, and our faith challenge is to accept the reality of that incompleteness of our human sexuality and learn to live with that tension in a positive and healthy way. That, in a nutshell, is what St Paul is trying to teach us.
Given this reality, it is understandable how deep the hurt is when a wife tells me through her tears that her husband is either having an affair, another whose husband is consumed with pornography, and a seventy-year old woman haunted by flashbacks of sixty-four years of sexual abuse. All these situations involve soul pain – a wound at the very core of our being as human beings created male or female in the image and likeness of God.
To bring it all together, both St. Paul and Jesus are asking us to have a strong lamp of faith; to be filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, to have the wick of an intimate prayer relationship with Jesus that heals us, and the flame of holiness, purity and selfless love that seeks only to do the will of God, and in that way, to build up the reign of God here on earth.
The Eucharist, in which humble gifts of bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Jesus, is a perfect antidote to the abuse of human sexuality in our world today. So too is contemplative prayer that seeks only to be open to the Father’s will and to soak up the Father’s love and healing.
May our celebration deepen our lamp of faith, fill us with the oil of the Holy Spirit, strengthen our wick of an intimate prayer life, and shine with the flame of pure selfless love in our all too dark world.
