Fifth Sunday 1997 #1

Reconnect ourselves with our own depths

I think it is really fortunate that the beginning of Lent this Wednesday and Black History Month fall quite accidentally on a day when these readings from Job, from Corinthians and from Mark, are part of the liturgy for Mass because I hope I can make sense of both Black History Month and Lent in the light of these three readings. The passage from Job is a curious one, I would be interested to see everybody’s response to hearing this thing: "Do not human beings have a hard service on earth and are not their days like the days of a laborer." I don’t think it’s fair to say that, well, Job was having a bad day. I think it is clear why the Jews chose to include the Book of Job in their Bible: it was their real understanding that human life is essentially difficult. It is peculiarly interesting that at the time when this was written the Jews did not believe in any life after death: what you have here is what you have, and that’s the end of it, period. It was centuries later when they came to believe that there was something after this mortal life: "My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, they come to their end without hope, remember that my life is a breath, my eyes will never again see good again." I think that this is appropriate for Lent because it raises the question of the whole Lenten project.

I would like to propose, and carry this proposal through the sermons of the Sundays of Lent, that one of the points of Lent is precisely to reconnect ourselves with our own depths, with what we think is deepest and truest in human life, so that our lives may be more authentic and lived from those depths, as opposed to the way I live, at least, which is pretty much on the surface. Today is a good example, I got two telephone calls before Mass which were not earth-shaking but both of them had to do with some substantial problems and there is a kind of restlessness in me right now.

Job is saying that life is hard, in and of itself. The problem gets more acute in the passages from Corinthians and Mark: no matter whose life it is and no matter how they are living it, life is hard. That certainly raises the question, what are the depths of human beings? The problem gets accentuated, as I said, in the Mark and the Corinthians passages because there the difficulties in life are not just the standard problems that come up for everybody such as weariness, physical disability, or whatever. These difficulties are impended precisely on the effort of trying to live as profoundly as possible. So you have, in a sense, a second level of difficulty here, and this too raises the question of Lent and for what purpose we might use Lent.

I must admit, I’m afraid, that I was terribly jolted when I read this thing from Job because I am a typical North American who spends enormous amounts of time surrounded by a whole chorus of voices that tell me that life ought not be difficult. I mean, it is really extraordinary to look at magazines or listen to news broadcasts which provide somebody else’s problem, they are supposed to make me feel better because I am not living in Albania or Rwanda. So, in a weird reflex way, that makes me feel that I’m okay. There is also a whole set of remedies. There has been a lot of talk about Star Wars having made 36million dollars the first week in its refurbished form. What does Star Wars do? It provides a kind of archetype for these mindless so-called action movies that are nothing but distractions: Twister, Speed, Broken Arrow... It is very difficult to go into Jumbo Video and look at the week’s offering and not find something that is, in it’s worst and most devastating sense, escapist. Escape from what? Escape from this message from Job. I think that we in North America congenitally believe in that deathless phrase from the headache ad, that headaches are unfair; or, from another classic ad, that one should not suffer from the heartbreak of psoriasis. We believe that stuff, however much we may be tickled by it, that headaches are unfair, and that psoriasis brings heartbreak and that not much else does.

In the light of that we have Jesus, who did not stand around and collect people’s applause: "no, I have a job to do, I’m off, I’m moving away...," or Paul, who precisely invited difficulty for himself when he said, "weep for the weak," and when he tried to become, I’m sure he didn’t pull it off, all things for all people (that’s enormously strenuous, try it if you don’t believe me.) Why? In the name of the Gospel, that the Gospel might be preached not for reward, he prided himself on the fact that he never took any salary for doing it, as most of the other missionaries did at this time. Paul invites this difficulty in life, and that’s where I find this Black History thing intriguing.

There are some true hymns pulled out of the African American tradition, the blacks’ experience of slavery. This is an extraordinary source for meditation. Some 11million human beings transported, with the help of some Africans, Arab traders, French, English, Portuguese, Spanish..., in unspeakable squalor, and transplanted all through the Caribbean, South America and the U.S., and somehow they can come to the point to sing "There is a Balm in Gilead." And these are people are not naturally Christian, if we can talk that way, but somehow the message of Jesus reached, and deepened, and transformed, and humanized these people. It is quite an amazing thing.

This is basically all I propose: Lent ought to be the time when I consider if I believe that life is difficult. Do I really believe that life is difficult, or have I bought into every therapeutic system that says: no, no, no, that’s an illusion. They basically want you to be adjusted and normal, and normal means to be happy all of the time. That is the first question I must ask myself. Have I come to grips with this passage from Job, this first level of difficulty? Am I really open enough to this experience of the world in which I live, or do I spend huge amounts of time, as I know I do, escaping that world and nursing my bruises? If I spend enough time on that question, I’ll be ready to ask this second question: where do I suffer for the Gospel? Of course it is not suffering for its own sake, as it was in the Church that I grew up in, but I think it is true that there are certain things about one’s own humanity that are available only through suffering, and there is no other way to learn them. Finally, it has been my experience, and I think the experience of most people, that those human beings that I have run across in my life who are most available, most ready to contact me, and whom I feel I can touch, are precisely people who live from that kind of awareness and accepted experience, accepted experience as well. So, we’ve got Job, then the ante’s raised with Paul, and then further with Jesus in the Gospel of Mark; they set an agenda for us.

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