Sitting with the Sacred

This week’s readings:

1. Jeremiah 20:7–9
2. Psalm 63:2, 3–4, 5–6, 8–9
3. Romans 12:1–2
4. Matthew 16:21–27

What this week’s readings say to me:

This week’s readings say to me that the room within me created for faith by humility and perseverance is not a comfortable space. It’s a space the Holy Spirit fills with its fire, and fire burns, and this fire cannot be contained. So it doesn’t let people who carry it be still in the place where they were before the fire sparked. People within whom it burns cannot help but move as it moves. They can’t help but spread it because their movement feeds it, and they give it room to spread. Spreading it means the next person who makes room for and fuels the fire can’t stay where he or she is either. As we witness this these effects of the spread, our inclinations toward convenience and self-preservation tell us to stop it. We don’t want to move. We don’t want to change. We don’t want to be different from earlier versions of ourselves or from the people around us. And we can’t stop these processes. We can increase our discomfort with the Spirit’s transformative power by resisting it, or we can find a peace that comes from freedom by accepting and participating in its transformative power.

The Good News is this transformative power. Its burning isn’t one that destroys but one that gives life. That life just won’t look the way our desires for convenience and self-preservation want it to because it changes us from the inside out and changes our relationship with our surroundings, including how we think about them, see them, and interact them. This change won’t let a person blend in, and the reading from Romans encourages us to ask for the grace not to want to blend in — at least not just for the sake of blending in. Any blending a person might do must be done for the Spirit. And any work done for the Spirit can only be done in cooperation with the movement of the Spirit.

The Gospel tells us not even to let fear for our lives get in the way of the movement of the Spirit. It says caving to such fear won’t save us, even though we may feel as if listening to fear will save us.

I used to think of this reading as being only about the importance of living faith and sharing it regardless of any risks that living it and sharing it might pose to my life. Of course, this is the literal message of the reading. However, I’ve come to want to apply it more broadly to life’s difficult situations. I wonder if my broader understanding will relate to someone else’s reflection on these readings. Let’s find out in the next two sections.

What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:

These days, I interpret the Gospel reading as telling me “to be and to do what God calls [me] to be and to do,” as Dr. Phyllis Zagano says. Follow this link to read or watch her reflection on how Sts. Phoebe and Gregory did just that and how their stories relate to this week’s readings.

Beyond this week’s readings:

God called Phoebe and Gregory to bring the Gospel to others in word and action. We are called to do the same, though not always by using the texts and trappings of our faith.

There are people all over the world for whom living their faith costs them their freedom and even their earthly lives. I hope none of us seeing these words ever have to pay those prices.

But even if we never have to, each of us dies and finds life regularly, but if we don’t surrender to these smaller deaths, we miss opportunities to find life.

For me, as a person with anxiety and cerebral palsy, one of these smaller deaths can mean doing things my mind says are not safe to do, such as:

• Joining a group with whom I might share an interest or a goal when I don’t know any of the members or when I don’t know how accessible the place where then be is going to be
• Having the courage to be who I am and share my perspective when I don’t fit totally into one camp or another in a world that’s divided and subdivided into camps.
• Having the courage to get to know someone whose experience is different from my own and may make me uncomfortable and encourage me to ask myself questions about my own views.
• Not avoiding situations that remind me of difficult ones I have faced in the past. Please understand that with this example, I’m not advocating that anyone stay in abusive situations. I’m saying that there’s a difference between an unpleasant or uncomfortable situation and an unhealthy or unsafe one. I’m also saying that anxiety likes to lie to me and tell me that these two types of situations are the same. They aren’t.

I’ve also come to believe that losing my life to save it encompasses surrendering control and ideas of what I want various situations and people to be like. I think this is such a difficult thing for all of us to do. I don’t know whether the difficulty of doing this increases depending on how great a sense of independence a person is used to having or if the desire and frustration are equally strong regardless of a person’s circumstances.

Either way, I can think of a few different ways to express the ironic truth in this week’s Gospel passage:

• However tightly I cling to life on earth I cannot make it last forever.
• Surrounding myself with different types of walls or with metaphorical bubblewrap might save my body, for a time, but these actions won’t save my soul. In fact, they might kill it. Furthermore, a withering soul withers the body, eventually – in one way or another. (I’m pretty sure too much isolation and too few contacts are unhealthy for the body and the soul. And eating one’s emotions, an attempt at treating the pain of the soul, I’d say, can kill the body if it isn’t moderated.)
• Staying alive is not the same as living; surviving is not the same as thriving.

Lord, help me neither to fear my death to earthly life, nor the precursors to this death that I face each day so that I can live in the freedom of the life you have planned for me. Amen.