The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Isaiah 55:6-9 | Philippians 1:20C-24, 27A | Matthew 20:1-16A

Oh God, who founded all the commands of your sacred law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that by keeping your precepts we may merit to obtain eternal life.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I think back to my earliest days 80 years ago when I began my life on this earth, and I think about the things I learned about my God.    It was so clear to me that God made sense.  He was very much like I was, in the sense that he would tell me that, if I would be a good little boy, understand his will and do it, then he would love me, and if I didn’t do that, then he would disown me, well, not just disown me.  I was frightened, as my seven-year-old mind, when I heard these words for the first time.  It basically said that he would destroy me.  He would burn me forever in hell.  All of that made total sense to me.  It was not mysterious, and I think for the most part my early part of my life, maybe more than just the early part but maybe until I started really thinking and meditating and wondering and entering into silence more and more.  After I retired, I began to see that, no, this is not the God who is.  This is not the God who created me.  He is not a logical, just God.  He is so much more than that, and the thing that became more and more clear to me as I grew in my latter years of understanding human nature, I realized that we, human beings, are some very interesting, complex creatures, and we have these different aspects of ourselves that we need to learn how to use and how to work with.  One is the mind, and one is the heart, and one is the will.  And to me, I never thought much about the heart.  I always thought about the mind and the will.  I was told who God is, and my will would say, “I believe.”  I was told what I should do by my mind, and then my will would say, “I will do that.”  And that seemed to be all that was necessary.

I guess I was in my, gosh, late 60s when I began to learn about the heart and what it is and what it does, and I began to wonder about it.  I remember looking up in the concordance to how many times heart was mentioned in scripture, and there were column after column after column after column.  And then I looked at the word love, and it didn’t have nearly as many.  Now, granted there are loving and loved or different words, but nevertheless, what surprised me was how often the scriptures made reference to the heart.  And then I learned that, in ancient civilizations, the heart was always considered to be the very center of the being.  It was who they were.  They wouldn’t think his mind was who he was, but his heart was who he was.  And what’s the difference between the two?  Well, the beautiful thing about the different, and I’ll explain it in a moment, is that they’re made for each other – made for each other.  The mind logically figures things out.  It plans.  It executes.  It figures out what’s needed.  It’s the tool that, I would say, we have in our being that allows us to live in the material world as it is, but then we know there’s another world besides the material world.  And the other world is the spiritual world, and somehow my religion never really made that crossover into the spiritual world like it should have, because it all seemed so practical and so ordinary and so natural that you do good, you get good, you do bad and you get bad.  And earning love seemed to make a lot of sense to me from the family of origin that I lived in.  That’s what I saw working around me, so it all sounded just fine.  What I didn’t realize is that the goal of religion, the goal of God’s plan for you and for me has little to do with perfection, in the way the mind understands perfection, but has everything to do with something else.  The something else is so interesting.  It’s not about perfection in terms of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong but to become someone, to become who God has intended us to be, that the task of religion is not perfection in the sense of using your mind and your will to do everything God tells you to do, but it’s much more mysterious.  It’s about the heart and the will, and the heart knows something that the mind can’t fathom, and it’s called mystery.  And the mystery is that there is something in our being, like a seed that was planted there by God, that is growing and becoming, and what it’s becoming is a pure reflection of who God is.  We’re here on this planet to discover self, who we are, and nothing would please God more than you and myself thinking, reflecting, being silent, asking God, “Who are you, God?  And who am I, and what is it we’re here to do?  What do you want from me?”  He doesn’t want perfection.  He wants a relationship.  He wants intimacy.  He wants unity, oneness. 

It’s so interesting that the mind is so prone to making divisions among people.  It likes to divide the world, and one of the most basic things that happened in the evolution of religion is a man by the name of Mani, who was a prophet in Iran – I guess it was probably in the third century, late third century.  He came up with a way of taking all religions and looking at them and saying, “Here’s the essence of what religion is.  It’s about a teaching that says there’s a great chasm between the material world and the spirit world, and the two are not compatible.  One is good, and one is bad.”  The material world by nature is bad.  The spiritual world is good.  So the less you can engage in the things of the earth, the things of the body, the better you are, and I look at that kind of spirituality, and it’s still pervasive in the world today of Christianity.  The body’s our problem.  Material things are our problem.  Money, power, all those things are our biggest problem.  No, our biggest problem is disunity, not connecting to who God really is and who we really are and what we’re really here for.  So the pressure on us is not to be perfect but to be honest, transparent, open, to be receptive to who God is and who we are, and the thing that is so interesting, when I started my faith, I had – I was just a seven-, eight-year-old boy, and I was studying the catechism every year in Catholic school.  And I remember there was a thing about why did God make us.  It was one of the questions.  Well, God made us to know him, to love him and to serve him.  I need to figure out who he is.  I need to muster up love for him, and I must love one another, I must love others.  And I think to myself, “Well, how do I do that?”  I guess it meant that I had to go to some expert who would know who God is, the church, the priest, the writers of theology, and I would say, “Tell me who God is.”  And they would tell me, and then my will would kick in and say, “Okay, I believe that because of who’s speaking.  I believe what you said.”  And then the love of him was something that I should come up with.  So I should learn to love a God who is just, who can condemn me as well as save me, and it was a little hard to muster up love in that direction.  But I sort of said, “Okay, I do love him,” but I didn’t feel in love with him.  Then to serve him, well, what does God need from you and from me?  Does he need us to love him?  Is he lonely without our love?  No. 

I’ve said this to you often.  I love this quote of Catherine of Siena.  When she asked God, “How can I love you?  How can I love you?”  He said, “I don’t need your love.  I need you for me as a response to who I am and what I long for you to be.  I want you to love your brothers and sisters.  That’s all I ask.”  St. Paul, in that second reading, says it so clearly.  “If I stay here, it’s for you.”  It’s so interesting, that shift from my own imperfection and evaluating everything I’m doing, whether it’s right or wrong and mostly coming up with the things that are wrong and not being able to change them and feeling a sort of undercurrent of shame all my life.  “There’s something wrong with me.  I never can do what I’m supposed to do,” living in that fog of shame.  And he’s saying, “No, that’s not – if you want to serve me, you just serve your brothers and sisters.  That’s all.  Be there for them.”  And I think to myself, “Well, that’s a tall order.  How can I be there for them?  How can I know what to say to somebody?”  If I go to my mind and say, “I’ve read about this problem.  This is what the experts say to people with this problem.  This is what I say to these people with that problem.”  No, he’s not saying that.  He’s saying, “If you in your heart intend to be who I call you to be, you will know that I’m there for you to love someone else, not you doing that act of love but you bringing that love that is in me for another to them in a way that makes them feel, know, experience love.”  To know him is to have him speak to us of who he is.  To love him is not to muster up love in ourselves but to somehow allow him to love us that way.  He’s going to give me everything I need to give to the people that I love, and that love that comes through me that is his changes them.  It’s like having all the money in the world that you need to fix a problem.  I carry within myself the wisdom and the presence of a healing, loving God that I can share with you by willing it.  That’s service.  So it’s not to know him.  It’s to allow God – maybe here’s a good way to say it – not to know him but to be known to him, to know ourselves as he knows us, and then not to love him but to allow him to love us so that we feel that he’s filled with nothing but kindness and gentleness and mercy for everything.  He puts us through difficult things to grow and to change, but always the intention is, “I want you to be the person I intended you to be,” because that is the place where we find fullness and happiness, by myself, imperfect but not without an incredible, powerful gift. 

Mani founded this religion that was all about good and bad and about evil and goodness, and it was all about duality, duality, duality.  And Manichaeism has been a heresy that started in that third century and lasted until the 13th century, but it lingers always everywhere.  Why?  Because the mind understands it so clearly, so easily, where the heart is this strange organ that you have to work with.  You have to enter into it.  You have to listen to the heart.  I remember when I first started this work, it seemed strange to me, but I didn’t go to the heart saying, “Heart, you speak to me.”  But what helped me more than anything else is to listen to scripture., and what it said over and over is, “I am in you.  I am with you.  I live in your heart, not your mind, not your will, not just your flesh, but I dwell in this organ that also thinks, that is connected to your endocrine system and to your nervous system and all that.  It is the font of everything we need, and the font is not the heart organ but the person who dwells there, the God who is there.  And one of the things that has helped me more than anything else, in terms of trying to get in touch with the wisdom that is there, is through this exercise of entering into that place of stillness, knowing there is the energy, the life force, the love, the wisdom.  Everything we need is there, and when we open ourselves to being a channel for it, we are in the closest union we can be to who God intends all of us to be. 

It seems too good to be true.  When I was younger, I always thought, “Well, the only people who could have any kind of holiness are the people who go away from the world,” much like Mani would approve, separate yourself from the material world, because that’s where everything is so negative and bad, and there’s power, and there’s control, and there’s violence.”  No, you have to separate yourself from all of that.  Don’t go near any of that.  Stay away from evil, and go into this isolated, sort of enclosed space of you and God alone.  I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with that.  There’s a calling to that mystical life where they do this work, and they pray, and they’re valuable.  People in monasteries, convents, all these places of separating from the world has [sic] its place, but for the most of us, we’re called to be in the world, our bodies engaged in the spiritual work.  And when you understand it and see it for the beauty that it is, it makes so much sense, even to my mind.  That would be the way God would work, not asking me to be acting like him on my own –   that would be egocentric – but to be his presence and to bring that presence to the person that we see closest to us that needs something and believing it flows from my heart to theirs by my intention. 

Father, it’s beyond our mind’s comprehension to fathom who you are.  You are more than any one of us could ever have imagined a God could be, and yet we resist it, because it takes us beyond our logical categories.  And so bless us with this heart wisdom, this place we can go to learn about you and to feel your presence and to know the value that we are to our brothers and sisters, and we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.