Category: Fervorini non predicati

Fervorini non predicati: The First Sunday of Advent, Year B

Isaiah 16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7. Psalm 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-10. 1 Corinthians 1:3-9. Mark 13:33-37.

I doubt any of us sang “Auld Lang Syne” as the clock struck midnight, but, for the Church, this is New Year’s Day. With the Season of Advent, a new liturgical year begins in a spirit of quiet anticipation. We look toward the celebration of our vulnerable God’s birth into the world of creatureliness. We look further ahead to the consummation of the Universe in the life of the Holy Trinity at the end of time. But we also look toward our own future on this earth as persons, as the Church, and as members of the many other, sometimes overlapping, communities to which we belong.

The past liturgical year has not been easy. Though the coronavirus pandemic has officially been over for some time, the illness continues to take a toll, and has left us all, probably, with a newly-urgent sense of our mortality. Deadly conflict rages in Ukraine and the Holy Land, overshadowing in the headlines without diminishing the reality of ongoing strife elsewhere in the world. Here in the wealthiest nation on the globe, the scourge of homelessness continues to expand, while minority communities face increasingly blunt expressions of intolerance (even, sometimes, from one-another) and a renewed sense, among a surprising number of Americans, that intimidation and violence are appropriate expressions of their convictions, while discriminatory legislation advances in a number of states (as, indeed, elsewhere in the world, sometimes in life-threatening ways). Personally, this past year, I have lost to illness and advancing age an unprecedented number of people who were, or were once, close to me.

Today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah reminds us of the essential thing. We must not “harden our hearts,” and hardness of hearts can take many forms, from habitual wrong-doing that, once routinized (or once we become dependent on its results) blinds us to its wrongness; to allowing our spiritual and psychological fortifications (entirely appropriate in a world that can wound) to become such bastions as to close us off from love given or received; to, frankly, wanting to give up on making a difference in the world from a sheer sense of its overwhelming problems.

Just as, in the Incarnation we anticipate this season, God opened God’s own life to us by becoming one of us, so we must open ourselves to God and the invitation to love that he is always so urgently extending.

The imagery of encounter from today’s reading from Isaiah, in which the Prophet invites God to “meet us in doing good,” is echoed in the collect from today’s Mass, asking God for “the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming.” This imagery, like the Gospel, is hopeful and optimistic about what, with God, each of us can do in love. We can change our lives for the better; we can be of service to the needs of our neighbor. What we do with an in God may seem small, but, joined with the work of many others of good will, and with that of all the angels and saints, the good is cumulative. As Advent takes us into winter, let us sprint through these cold days and nights toward the warm embrace of the Lord, who runs toward an encounter with us, too.

Fervorini non predicati: Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Isaiah 55:6-9; Psalm 145:2-3, 8-9, 17-18; Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a; Matthew 20:1-16a

Painting of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, Jacob Willemszoon de Wet, 17th century, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, public domain

If the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard were about the wages and hours of laborers, it would be shocking in its apparent endorsement of injustice. But it isn’t. The idea of a parable is to arrest our attention with something surprising or outrageous in order to make a point about something else. The point here has to do with our relationship with God. What God has to offer us is not money (though some would have it so), but God; or, put another way, grace. In this world we tend to value things on the basis of their scarcity, and money can be hard to come by and difficult to get enough of, even for those who are willing to work for it; so our Lord seems to use it here in order to get us thinking about what is of value. Relationship with God is greatly to be valued, but it isn’t scarce. God offers himself abundantly to everyone, not as payment for doing good things but as a gift, as is always the case with love. To share in God’s own life is a gift into the mysteries of which we will be delving for all eternity, without ever exhausting its riches, and that is so whether it is a gift we find ourselves willing to receive early in life or late. But to say this is not to deny the value of our work. What we do with and in God has great value precisely in so far as it is an expression of the divine life we have been, in Christ, invited to share, the divine love we have been called to express in all we do.

Fervorini non predicati: Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

A fervorino, in the context of liturgy, is a short homily; the sort of thing one might expect to hear in the course of a weekday Mass. Given the nature of both my “secular” work and my apostolate, I seldom preach. But I thought I might try to offer here a brief reflection on the readings for Mass on Sundays and Solemnities: a fervorino non predicato or unpreached homilette, if you will (not to be confused with the delicious French egg dish that some of you probably plan to enjoy at brunch today!). I apologize in advance if I am not entirely consistent about this; there will undoubtedly be weeks when my other responsibilities preclude writing something here.

Sirach 27:30-28:7; Psalm 103:1-4, 9-12; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

Today’s reading from Sirach begins with an arresting image: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” One imagines a person who has nothing left but anger, no one left to embrace but the destructive phantom of their own rage. A hellish thought. Yet anger is a complex thing. One often hears that anger can be good: that it can motivate to action in the interests of justice, compassion, or love, and this is true to some extent. If we were all emotionally neutral in the face of harm there would be no progress toward its undoing. But even justified anger can sometimes be reminiscent of misguided attempts to introduce invasive species into ecosystems in order to correct some problem, resulting, as with kudzu in the American South or cane toads in Australia, in new and much bigger ones. Anger can be consuming and engulfing; even when it begins with good reason and is aimed at achieving good things, it can blaze out of control, harming even the one whose anger it is, constricting interior freedom.

The emotional turmoil of anger can cloud our judgement as to whether or not we are really in the right in a given situation. And here we arrive at the pith of today’s Gospel: hypocrisy. Jesus himself is sometimes, albeit rarely, portrayed in the Gospels as angry, and nothing seems to provoke that response from him more reliably than when people insist that others uphold standards that they themselves, in practice, despise. The servant in the Gospel today is forgiven an enormous debt, only to resort to violence in seeking to extract a petty payment from another. One of the great dangers of anger is that we can find ourselves exacting from others standards of which we ourselves fall short, either because our hearts have become so hard as to be oblivious to our own reality and obsessed with the shortcomings of others, or because, in some way, we are seeking to use the other as a scapegoat for our own guilt (a role Our Lord has insisted he is happy to play, if played it must be, and one that he alone can).

St John Cassian
St John Cassian, anonymous, public domain

St John Cassian, the great monastic mystic, is uncompromising on this subject: “the deadly poison of anger… must be totally uprooted from the depths of our soul. For as long as it resides in our hearts and blinds our mind’s eye with its harmful darkness, we shall be able neither to acquire the judgment of a proper discretion nor to possess a good contemplative vision or a mature counsel, and we shall not be sharers in life…” (Institutes, VIII.i). Importantly, uprooting anger is not the same thing as suppressing it. If we tamp it down into the recesses of our hearts, it will, reliably, one day explode. Uprooting it is more like frankly confronting its causes, pondering what, if anything, we might do to address them, taking such action as we can in love, and entrusting the situation to God. Often, I realize, easier said than done. But, on the other hand, St John Cassian and the other Desert Fathers and Mothers are remarkably optimistic about what we human beings can achieve with and in God.

It is not for me to say when and how you should embrace anger. Each of us must make that discernment, prayerfully, for ourselves. But, if and when we do allow anger in, we must handle it with great care if we wish to be “sharers in life” and the freedom that is ours in Christ.