WEEK 08 01 – Year I
(Sir 17:24-29; Ps 32; Mk 10:17-27)
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Today’s readings encourage us to pray for faith strong enough to practice a spirituality of letting go.
Two of my mentors, Ron Rolheiser OMI and Richard Rohr OFM, share comments pertinent to these readings. Rohr posits that good spirituality is all about letting go. Rolheiser defines purgatory as “a letting go of the things of the earth.”
Our human tendency is just the opposite. We are born into a wonderful but wounded world in which we all experience a lack of love, as only God can provide us with the love we need to feel totally secure. The first consequence of that lack is our most basic, primal defect of character – human insecurity. That feeling of insecurity, inadequacy, emptiness and incompleteness translates immediately into the instinct to accumulate things, to cling to possessions, to compete for attention.
A cousin of ours was asked to care for the wealthy widow of a business colleague after he died. When it came time to place her in a retirement home, he had to dispose of five dogs, four cars and discovered a basement full of old clothes. Her version of charity, it seems, was to purchase items in a thrift shop and throw them into the basement. When he tried to return some items to the thrift shop, he was told everything would have to be first washed because of the dogs. In the end, he hired a group of students to empty the basement, and they filled a dumpster with 800 garbage bags of old clothes!
We are tempted, in our human insecurity and lack of faith, to place our trust in three specific areas of life, symbolized by the three temptations the Israelites faced in the desert, and to which they continually succumbed: possessions (turn these rocks into bread), prestige (jump off the temple) and power (all the kingdoms of the world for worshipping Satan). These are the same temptations Jesus resisted and refused.
The 12 Step program lists these temptations as money, fame and power. Thomas Keating develops them into an inordinate need for safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control. In his words, “Jesus was tempted to satisfy his bodily hunger by seeking security in magic rather than God; to jump off the pinnacle of the temple in order to make a name for himself as a wonderworker; and to fall down and worship Satan in order to receive in exchange absolute power over the nations of the world. Security, esteem, power – these are three classic areas where temptation works on our false programs for happiness.
The readings today address this spiritual malaise in a wonderful way. The author of Sirach invites us to let go of guilt and fear by coming to God for forgiveness of all our sins. This is a call to repentance and conversion like the third Luminous mystery of the rosary – the call to repentance and the proclamation of the Kingdom. Psalm 32 stresses that happiness and joy come from confession of sins and forgiveness of our transgressions. The last line of the last stanza adds the dimension of healing – being surrounded with “glad cries of deliverance.”
That is precisely the area of his life that Jesus invites the rich young man to address. He had been dutiful and has kept all the commandments since his youth but wants more – he wants to “inherit eternal life.” Knowing that no one can earn or inherit eternal life, that it is given freely to those who believe and trust in him, Jesus “looked at him and loved him” and invited him to make a quantum leap of faith far beyond keeping laws, to enter into a risky, intimate trusting relationship with him, to roll all his dice on the gospel, as the source of experiencing that eternal life here and now. Unfortunately, the young man, revealing a lack of faith that so often shadows a legalistic mentality of keeping laws and trying to earn God’s love, stumbled, chose to cling to his possessions, and went away sad.
I experienced this gospel in my first year of ministry as a young Oblate missionary. I attended a charismatic conference in Calgary in 1976 and found myself feeling inexplicably sad at the closing, while others were dancing for joy. The next day, the gospel for the Eucharist at which I was presiding at the Grey Nuns’ Centre in Edmonton was this one, and I suddenly realized as I proclaimed the gospel, I was that rich young man. I had attended a joyful faith event and had come away sad. But why, was the puzzling question in my heart? I had taken final vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, was ordained a priest, and was doing my best to keep the laws of the church and the rules of religious life.
The answer came as a shock from the students in a grade eleven Christian Ethics class later that week. We watched a filmstrip based on John Powell’s book Why Am I Afraid to Love? that describes the masks people wear. When I asked the students what they thought my mask was, they replied to a person, The Messiah! Suddenly, I realized what it was that was robbing me of joy and freedom in my ministry – I thought I was the Messiah and savior of the north – that it was up to me to solve everyone’s problems and fix everyone’s dysfunction, an impossible task, and one that belonged to Jesus. That was my need for conversion, my painful inner reality and awareness of what I had to let go. Now I am grateful for that feedback and insight that helped me to let go, heal and grow.
The Eucharist is an opportunity for us to practice this spirituality of letting go. In the penitential rite we repent and receive forgiveness for our failings. As we are nourished by God’s Word, and receive the body and blood of Jesus, we experience healing of our deep-seated defects of character like a Messiah complex.
May our celebration send us out, humbled, forgiven and healed, to be a source of hope for our sinful and wounded world, still caught in a web of insecurity and a desperate attempt to find security, esteem and power by human effort alone.
