In today’s Gospel Story (Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23) you are criticized by the Scribes because you and your disciples were eating without washing their hands according to the religious tradition of the time. You said, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile”. As we try to follow you, your Spirit takes us on a journey of ongoing constant conversion. We become aware that what is inside of us is interfering with a deeper relationship in you. As we do our best to be open to your Spirit, what seems to change are our internal values that we use to make our choices. Being part of a tradition and following its rules and dogmas is a necessary and important place to start our journey. The time may come, when we feel the need to go where they point us, which might involve letting go of them and doing our best to be open to your Spirit. This can be a lonely and frightening place to be, and isn’t a nice experience. Perhaps it’s the cross we’re asked to carry.
The Scribes saw you were not keeping the rules and accused you of not believing in God. Even in our own day some say we cannot be of God if we are not keeping all the rules, believing all the right things. For some, keeping the rules is more important than being open to your Spirit. There seem today to be litmus tests for being a “loyal” or “true” catholic. We have to be absolutely against abortion as the most serious issue facing us, to condemn our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters for “choosing” to be who they are. Some would go so far as to say we have to favor a given political party or candidate. Some great and deep theological minds have been silenced for stepping outside the lines. Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, is a good example, as is the recently deceased Bishop Tom Gumbleton, both of whom paid a heavy price for going where your Spirit led. Pope Francis is facing much opposition, especially in the United States, as he tries to move the church towards being a listening church open to the Spirit guiding us.
Throughout history religious systems have not been kind to persons who don’t agree with everything they teach and do. Also there have been courageous persons who felt called by your Spirit to take an action that a given tradition did not like, and they were punished with varying degrees of severity, including loss of life. In our own day can we say that people who do things that a tradition doesn’t like are not following your Spirit as they understand her guiding them? Is someone in favor of ordaining women as priests or deacons defying the Spirit? Folks working for the full recognition and acceptance of our LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers, in the belief that every single one of us as we are reflects God as no one else can, do they believe your Spirit is leading them and doing what you call them to do? The recent kerfuffle over Pope Francis approving the blessing of folks in same-sex relationships shows how difficult this is. Any who deviate from what the (often self-appointed) enforcers of a given tradition’s “our way is the only true way” will face their own suffering, as happens today. Where you welcomed everybody, people claiming to act in your name are keeping folks they don’t know, and therefore fear, away from you. People who love the Gospel but don’t see it happening in their tradition leave to find where it is lived. Is your Spirit saying something here? It is easier to judge others than to face my own need for ongoing conversion.
You promised to send us the Spirit to help us understand what it means for us to be your disciples in our own particular circumstances. She takes us, if we want to be open to it, on a journey of ongoing and constant conversion, a journey of wondering, questioning, even doubting, While there are commonalities, each of us is on our own journey, so the Spirit might be saying different things to each of us, not contradictory, just different questions and perspectives. When we are open to it, we can realize our life is s spiritual journey, and the Spirit is with us each step of the way. Sometimes this is fairly clear to us, other times not so much. It’s nice to realize the Spirit does guide us, and sometime She guides us in a direction we do not want to go. And so our growth happens.
You show us a Father who loves every one of us as we are beyond anything we can imagine. You talk about God’s kingdom happening among us here and now. You reached out to everybody you met, especially the outcasts and the lost, people some religious system say are not good enough for God. Many traditions are more focused on fear than anything else, and present God as a judge we have to please in this life so we can get to heaven in the next life. They create rules and doctrines that often have more to do with maintaining the organization and keeping the people in line than with God. They say, in effect, “if you want to get to God you have to go through us and do it our way”. Yet, when we want to know how God “thinks”, we just have to look at you, what you taught, how you lived, how you care for everybody especially the outcasts. Yet many systems create outcasts themselves, claiming to act in your name.
In all that is going on these days on my journey I believe you are inviting me to ongoing conversion, to let your Spirit lead me to know myself and you in greater depth. More wandering and wondering. It is confusing and difficult to let go of what is familiar and move to what is new. It’s not up to me to decide where and how, only to welcome and say yes to you happening in my life every day. It is leading me to experience your love and mercy, your understanding, your active caring in very real ways. Poetry can say what other genres can’t. So, in the words of the Irish poet and mystic John O’Donahue, “May my mind come alive today to the invisible geography that invites me to new frontiers, to break the dead shell of yesterdays, to risk being disturbed and changed”. . .”What is being transfigured here is your mind, and it is difficult and slow to become new; the more faithfully you can endure here, the more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn”. And Teilhard, “Above all, trust in the slow work of God”. Everything is as it needs to be. Wouldn’t change a thing. Just sayin . . .