Giving from the Substance of Our Lives

YOUTUBE VIDEO

One of the great challenges of spiritual maturity is sorting out the meaning between intentions and results in your life. We’re all struggling with that. We all have good intentions about a lot of things. The electorate had that. Good intentions were given to many people, and completely different results have happened. When that happens in your life on any personal, collective, or whatever issue, the challenge illustrates that there’s also a margin we must pay attention to, called freedom. This freedom is experienced very really, but we also admit to ourselves that our notion of what we think freedom is is sometimes very limited. We only understand the measure of its impact on our lives or others in degrees as we make a journey or the pilgrimage of life, as we call it in spirituality.

An author, Alistair McIntyre, wrote a book called Stories many years ago. He illustrated in that book that the people who are all of us are about doing a co-narrative about our lives all our life long. It’s a co-narrative because the narrative is intersected by many things out of our control or unforeseen things that we couldn’t even imagine would occur in our lifetime. This narrative we co-author as we write our own story causes us to experience causes, effects, choices, chances, and how they emerge in our lives. Also, it calls us to make a decision on how much value we place in them as something really substantive and calling us, especially as Christians, to our willingness to allow God providentially to guide and aid us at all times because we’ve come to believe that the words of Jesus, “Behold, I am with you all days until the end of the world.” But when you experience this challenge between intentions and results, you may find that your ability to freely believe is lacking.

It was so much lacking at the time when Sigmund Freud was alive. He wrote a letter to Mrs. Maria Bonaparte. She wasn’t kin to Napoleon. But she had inquired with him about the meaning of life. His letter and response to her began to stamp the late 18th and early 19th century and beyond, even to her own time. In his response, he told her, “To hope of finding meaning and value in life is insane.” Thus, he abandoned humankind’s approach to a meaningful world and said it was meaningless. Later, he would say in the following sentence, “It’s a meaningless world.” This observation was made by another author, Philip Reif, who wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that, but it’s a powerful book. Philip Reif wrote back in the early 20th century. However, it affected us as a Western society because we put a lot of counsel into Freud rather than Jung and others who followed him. So you can see here’s a very lettered European who is well-studied in human behavior and things like that as a life scientist. But still ending up with a very empty perspective.

Interestingly, parallels were selected here when we think of this passage from the Gospel today and about the prophet who comes to another widow. But it’s important to remember that when we think of miracles, I was told by a Jesuit scholar years ago in Europe that we were studying some sacred scripture in the Old Testament and knew. He remarked, “Remember that,” and used this passage from Mark and Isaiah. He said, “Remember that miracles are something you participate in. You have to bring something to the table, and then you’ve got to let it go to God and let God providentially deal with it.” But it’s always a cooperative effort and never like magic. Many people, and all of us, can find in our lives that sometimes we want more magic because magic puts us in egocentric control. God and gods or fairies or whatever will do what I want. That’s the bottom line of magic, to do what you want. It doesn’t matter whether black or white magic; it all ends up in the ego. Eosentrism, as we call it. But with the mystery of miracle, because we believe in a participatory God who is in relation to the creation, relationship, and relationship to us in the Judeo-Christian belief, is that God is not any further away than the end of your nose and actually beyond your nose into your lungs and everything else. But God always humbly approaches us with great humility and respect about how we and how the wonder of life and all the visages of things that evolve in one’s life, how we’re going to walk with God’s presence and at the same time walk in trust, but also find the celebration and the wonder and the capacity to live a full life whether it’s in tragedy or in beauty, wonder, and triumph. It’s there where that transcendent experience of God’s relationship of love, which would be another word for grace, affects us, but yet doesn’t abandon us to do it alone but at the same time upholds what we can be and what we can become by doing the grace within ourselves and for others, you might say.

Life is sort of like a tree; you’ve probably heard this expression; if you look at the rings of aging in a tree, it’s an interesting metaphor for human life because they are recorded for a tree that a tree has to stay in place all its life, it doesn’t get up and walk around like a token. Still, the important thing is that the tree has to weather so many changes beyond its power to have life. It’s one of the oldest species on the earth outside of insects, incidentally, in the evolutionary scale of things. You see a downed tree or something like that, and you can read it when you think of it. Scientists do this now they read whether there were more diseases, more drought, more winters, and so forth, and the further study is how the tree adapted, how the tree experienced this, and what was the result of how it continues to stay in place and be alive and still self-giving both in its root systems and in its branches and leaves to so many other creatures of this planet. So it causes us to think that one of the aspects of a miracle is to create alterations, that God can inspire us in such a way as to make alterations in our lives.

Now, the woman who is the widow in the story of the prophet is making an alteration when the prophet comes on the scene. She does the courtesy of her faith, which was when a stranger came, you offered them what you had. They came by your household as if it were water or anything like that because the ancient belief in Israel was you might be entertaining an angel, and that’s still persistent in Bedouin practice in Egypt if you ever go there. And so there was this firm belief that a favor would be granted. It all goes back to Abraham, you know. The three mysterious strangers show up and prophesy that Sarah will be pregnant the next time they come around. Of course, both he and Sarah are in disbelief at this. Still, you watch the actions of Abraham. In that case, he participates in the miracle that will happen to Sarah. Sarah also participates even though she laughs in the tent at this ridiculous prophecy these three strangers give. This same storyline comes to us in the first reading, but the widow is at the end of her rope. You know she’s been surviving famine with her son. She’s a widow, and she’s a woman. She has no economy other than the jewelry she might have had. It’s perhaps all that was in the gone because all she’s got left is a few sticks, a fire, and a little flour and oil to make a cake. Then she knows that her son is going to die, and she’s going to die of starvation, too. But what she does is she participates in this mysterious utterance of this prophecy by faith and she gives the little that she has which was to survive just maybe another few days and give this to the stranger hoping for a blessing and of course miraculously we’re told that she’s it’s prophesied to her that you know the flowers not going to run out and the oil is not going to run out you know and then you see Jesus claiming and affirming this type of response because the widow comes to the treasury she’s not expecting anything back but she’s very faithful but she uses it very much to illustrate to his disciples what it really means to give from the substance of your life and allow a pathway for Providence to really demonstrate for you how close and how wonderful it is and here you have Jesus symbolically more than symbolically looking into her heart and life and seeing the depth of which God really treasures this great woman who actually lives and mirrors back to Jesus what it’s going to cost him on the cross he’s going to have to give not from the excesses of his life and ability he’s going to have to give out of the absolute essence of himself and give it away entirely in death for a greater miracle to save the human race for all ages and the universe so he’s seeing him there a prophecy coming through her and he’s affirming that prophecy to others that will have to follow this same way.

Saint John Paul II wrote in encyclical some years back before his passing about the economy and I think it was and I can’t remember the Latin term right off hand pardon me but in there he said to the world and especially the church he said God has called you to give not merely from your surplus but from the substance of your life and he was calling the church to take a risk a significant risk to divest itself in such a way as to help the poor of the nations and that every opportunity that we have as a disciple if we’re really wanting a miracle we open ourselves to that Providence that says I can trust God and I can do for that for another person that which I would hope if I were in their shoes would be done for me and celebrate that as a actual miracle of God’s Providence with us see a lot of times when we look at miracles we we want to see bright lights and fireworks and everything around it but miracles that I have witnessed a lot of times in life are much much much more subtle than that because it’s involved with the transformation of a human person’s not in so much sometimes that it can transform everything about the situation that they’re in but something really divine something beautiful something like Mother Teresa had said do something beautiful for God that was her response do something beautiful for God because God’s given you the power to do that to act like God in behalf of another.

I remember I think I told you this story but I’ll repeat it just because I think it’s a good thing to for me if not for you I was in Honduras and during the Nicaraguan Revolution and this I’d gone three days on horseback to with another priest to visit this village that hadn’t seen a priest in over two years and they were all indigenous people they lived on this one mountain they had their own language and everything wonderful people and they were entirely Catholic and so we went there and the moment that I got there I got off my horse and the horse had stepped into a big anthill and they were those soldier ants you know kind of thing so they’re not fun to play with and the horse started jumping as I was trying to get my toe out of the stirrup and I fell to the ground and of course the horse was kicking and ran off and and then father Michael came over in the two vocaros and said are you okay and then the ants were just pouring out of there like this red blood stream and all of a sudden this little boy who is about probably about two about three years ago just learned to walk I would think he steps on his father’s machete and cuts his foot in half all the way up to the bone blood flowing everywhere and you got the red ants and one thing you’ve got this little boy bleeding and turning white and we only had band-aids and some gauze and some you know antiseptic cream so I ran over to him his mother was hysterical she had been trying to fix food some tortillas for us and so there she is blood all over in front of her and so I started holding his foot together as I knelt before him and his little sister who was about six years old was standing there watching all this and I knew that it felt like as much as I was praying it felt like I felt extremely powerless nothing to do and the other than do what I could which was to comfort and bandage the foot together and do what I could do and put a tourniquet but not so tightly so after doing that I walk off and I thought I’m just I just need to clear my head so I walked down towards this little stream that ran below the village and this little girl her shadow I saw her shadow beside me and she came up and took my hand and we sat down by the stream together and she had she had a little tangerine beautiful golden tangerine in her hand and she looked up at me as I was staring at both of our faces in the stream and she put the tangerine in my hand and I wrote a poem called the little the girl with son in her hand the importance of this was the widow’s might because at that time all the produce that was being produced for General Foods Corporation and Dole the best fruit was being shipped off to the country and the people of Honduras always had the poorest of anything that was left but a tangerine for a little five-year-old girl was like having a banquet and she gave her back with away to me and that’s when I learned to the meaning of this passage these two passages give a mere substance as St. John Paul II said and that kept ringing you know over this lifetime that I’ve had and it and it really started me an understanding that we have to have a passionate knowledge and that’s what happened in the heart and spirit of this little girl in the middle of that village on the mountain in Honduras years ago she had a passionate knowledge gifted to her by God of what God would do and she was only five years old couldn’t read and write but if she were she was a saint in my estimation.

Life can be read like rings even in a small tree even a tree that’s just a sapling has a story to tell us so we never put her until total emphasis on just what we can do but also what God will do within us and give us the power to do even in our limitations they’re sobering treks for us all ahead but isn’t a pilgrimage in faith that in truth you know the way we used to say we used to talk about journey I think was Joseph Campbell who said one time that the word journey really came from the land the distance you could travel in one day and maybe we only have one day but one day as the scriptures tells us is one day in God’s imagination is like a thousand lifetimes or a thousand years and and you often hear in our culture are we there yet most of its derogative are science to its impatience are marginalized as people that we might be around are their intelligence of their abilities are we there yet imagine a teacher or professor saying that to you and you’re trying to learn but imagine that on a spiritual level and if I’m carrying that kind of attitude with the very energy that I could turn to love and support and say we’re on a journey together but you just need my help and I need yours pilgrimage is often bring us to very different different destinations at times but the destination the closer we get to it all of a sudden we realize another destinations even further grace is that mystery of working in our lives the destination that God has already revealed but it is not without its challenges not without its struggle not without asking of us give the substance of your heart whatever that mean means for you and your conscience and from that will flower you know a new creation intentions are definitely to be discerned as opposed to the results we expect and I’m sure that little girl who I hope grew up to a womanhood and the fullness of her life is still putting a piece of Sun in the world and in the hearts of others.