Sitting with the Sacred

This week’s readings:

1. Job 7:1–4, 6–7
2. Psalm 147:1–2, 3–4, 5–6
3. 1 Corinthians 9:16–19, 22–23
4. Mark 1:29–39

What this week’s readings say to me:

The first reading reminds me I’m not alone when life feels like a burden and everything life involves feels like nothing more than an ending and unwelcome obligation. It reminds me it’s okay to share these feelings with God in an unfiltered way. It also encourages me to consider the ways the situations I find myself in might be different than the trials Job finds himself in the midst of. It reminds me to look for blessings, however insignificant they sometimes seem.

This week’s psalm is one of praise. It characterizes God as a healer of all kinds of wounds, a healer whose wisdom has no limits.

The third reading returns to the subject of obligations, specifically the obligation to preach the gospel. When I read the parts of 1 Corinthians that come before and after this reading, I’m reminded that preaching the gospel is about so much more than talk. It’s about living like Jesus so that his message will come alive for others through me. Living like Jesus means giving of myself to others, acknowledging my feelings and desires and what I’m experiencing in a given moment, without forgetting that these realities are for from permanent.

Therefore, I have the obligation to preach the gospel with my life regardless of how I feel about having that mission. If I’m eager to fulfill that mission, the fulfilling of it is its own reward. If I’m not eager, then I’ve been asked to share the gifts that God has given to me anyway. I’m also challenged when I share these gifts not to expect to receive anything from the person with whom I’m sharing. The promise of the reading, perhaps, is that the reward whenever I offer nothing beyond my obedience will be grace received from giving without expectations. Such giving promises the grace of spiritual freedom. It seems to me that this freedom paradoxically offers the ability to reach out to people from many different walks of life because a spiritually free person isn’t preoccupied with the concerns of only one individual or group. A person can get a more expansive perspective from this situation because she hasn’t zoomed in on the picture too closely.

In the fourth reading, I see Jesus living what this paradox of spiritual freedom looks like. Peter’s mother-in-law is ill, and Peter brings this situation to Jesus, who cares for His friend by making the mother-in-law well. Yet Jesus doesn’t just help His closest companions or the people in one town. We read about Him moving on to the next town. But before He does so, He makes time for rest, quiet, prayer, and reflection, showing that these activities are essential to fulfilling His mission, which is a mission you and I have been asked to share with others and with Him.

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

Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz’s reflection on this week’s reading calls attention to what Jesus does when He heals Peter’s mother-in-law. I find it inspiring that she zeros in on the very human detail that she does. Read here to find out what I mean. Her reflection also includes a quotation I’ll turn into a pull quote that makes a good summary of this week’s readings, as well as a words to bring to prayer.

Discovering wholeness, healing, and joy do not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak.  In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive.  Yet as we are healed and discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters.  We have hardship without becoming hard.  We have heartbreak without being broken.

From The Book of Joy:  Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, as quoted by Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz

Beyond this week’s readings:

I’m not writing this post as a person who practices what this week’s readings preach. My natural inclination right now and at almost all other times, it seems, is to crawl in a hole in the ground with a device whose battery somehow never dies and lose myself in games, music, and movies. Forever. Because silence and reality feel too heavy to bear.

Now movies, games, aren’t necessarily bad things. In fact, I believe they can be part of rest. It’s the desire to turn only to these things that’s problematic, to say the least. My experience is that these activities don’t provide rest that’s truly restorative. Maybe an activity’s ability to restore makes the difference between its ability to provide escape and its ability to provide rest. The things that are easy for me to turn to offer escape, while prayer and reflection provide rest.

Can listening to music to be a form of prayer? Absolutely. But my experience is that even music or a movie with a spiritual message sometimes offers the illusion of a preferable change in feelings or perspective, an illusion that fades once the music or the picture fades.

I guess this experience is a reminder that so much of life is fleeting, and that the only constants are God and change and that God is the source of true rest. And yet God isn’t calling me to rest all the time — even in God. The time for eternal rest comes after this life. While I still have this life, God calls me to a varying rhythm of work and rest.

Lord, help me to resist the constant desire to withdraw and to stay withdrawn. Help me to reach out to others rather than lash out at them. Amen.

Work Consulted but Not Linked to

The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.