Everybody knows that St. Patrick is the patron saint of the Irish. But not everyone knows that St. Patrick was actually English by birth. More accurately, he was a Briton, born in what is now the UK under the last days of the Roman Empire. When he was a teenager, Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates. He spent some six years as their slave before escaping and returning to his family in Britain. However, after being ordained a priest, he decided to return to Ireland to evangelize the people that formerly had help him captive. Later, he became a bishop and did much to build up the Christian religion in Ireland. The rest is history.
In the first reading today, we hear about another man who is born in one place but finds his destiny somewhere else. Abram, or Abraham as he is later known, has just completed a journey from Chaldea to Canaan, a journey that he undertook at God’s prompting. It is in Canaan that God has promised Abraham that he will make him the “father of many nations,” with his descendants numbering as many as the stars in the sky. For Abraham, God’s plan is unexpected, probably perplexing, and yet Abraham responds obediently with faith in what God says. Like Patrick, he’s willing to go beyond what is comfortable and familiar to seek the fulfillment of what God has envisioned for his life.
Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, Abraham Will Be Father of Many Nations (c. 1850)
In many ways, the season of Lent has echoes of this theme: it invites us to respond with obedience to what is unexpected, even perplexing, in God’s plan for our lives. Lent offers us the chance to be purified, not only of our sins, but of every semblance of thinking we have ultimate control over what happens to us. It’s an opportunity for renewed obedience. We are invited to take up practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as a way of remembering that we are not the center of the universe. Indeed, we shouldn’t even be the center of our own lives. God and those in need have a greater demand upon us. But while penitential practices are good, there is also the need for an interior spirit of obedience. As we heard on Ash Wednesday, taking up exterior disciplines don’t benefit us at all if we are not willing to be disciplined also on the inside.
If I may, I’d like to suggest that one of the best ways of learning interior discipline, and one of the hardest as well, is learning to accept the perplexing circumstances and unfortunate happenings of life – and indeed, not just to accept them, but to accept them joyfully. Fr. Jacques Philippe, a French priest and one of the best spiritual teachers today, writes about just this idea in his book Interior Freedom. He says that when something negative happens to us, our natural impulse in response is usually rebellion, rejecting that thing and trying to avoid it or undo it. If that fails, we respond with resignation, recognizing that the situation is beyond our control and that it’s best to just admit the fact. But while this may be the natural limit for most people, Fr. Philippe says that as Christians we have a further step: consent. In consenting to something negative, something beyond our control, we actually exercise our freedom, and freely choosing what before had seemed so negative, can grant us the joy and confidence that before we had lacked. By consent, we renew our love and trust in God and we deepen our hope in all things working together unto good (Rom 8:28).
Obviously, this is a lot easier said than done, and some negative things are more easily consented to than others. Learning how to accept an unexpected health diagnosis is going to be more challenging than some of the day to day inconveniences we face. But being joyful in consenting to those smaller nuisances and difficulties can help give us the interior discipline, the deeper trust in God, when the bigger challenges come along. We may not always understand God’s will but we can respond with faith in the promises he has made, just as Abraham did. We can be mindful of how God can take something negative – as he did for Patrick, even something as terrible as being kidnapped into slavery! – and utilize it ultimately as a step in our own road to sainthood.
Ultimately, we do this because it is what Christ did. In today’s Gospel, Jesus shows Peter, James, and John his divine glory, but he does so to prepare them for his own coming crucifixion and death. Jesus is the Divine Son of the Father, who has come to fulfill at last the covenant made to Abraham, to accomplish the plan of redemption foretold by the prophets. To do so, though, he must go to the Cross. If the Incarnate Lord obediently, joyfully went to his own death to realize our salvation, should we not seek to accept obediently, even joyfully, the hard things that come our way?
James Barry, The Baptism of the King of Cashel by St. Patrick (c. 1780)
Friends, as we continue our traverse through this season of Lent, the lives of Abraham, Patrick, and even Jesus show us how we should navigate our own lives. The unexpected, perplexing, and even negative circumstances and happenings of our lives afford us the chance also to journey beyond what is comfortable and familiar and into a place of deeper trust, deeper faith in God. Whether those journeys are big or small, we can learn not just to accept them, but even to consent to them in joy because we believe that through them God is drawing us one step closer in our path toward him. That ultimately is our greatest journey, the destiny to which God calls each of us: from sinner to saint, from earth to heaven, from this life to life with him.
No comments:
Post a Comment