When my daughter was in the ninth grade, she decided all of a
sudden that she wanted to show dogs. The group of girls who were becoming her
new high school best friends all showed dogs, and she wanted to be like them.
“OK,” I said,
“You can learn how to show our family dog, Max. He’ll enjoy the attention.”
“Oh Mom,” she
moaned. “You can’t show just any old dog. You have to have a pure-bred, AKC
certified show dog. I love Max, but he won’t do at all. I need to get a pure-bred
puppy.”
“No way,” I protested
in my best “because-I-said-so” voice, determined to nip this bad idea in the
bud. “We can’t afford a fancy show-dog, and you have no idea what you would be
getting yourself into. You can’t go out or spend the night with your friends
with a puppy to take outside every few hours. You’d get the dog, and then a
week later you’d decide that you don’t like showing dogs. It will be just like
Max, and the rabbit, and the gerbils, and the hermit crabs, all of which I
ended up taking care of. No way.”
Six months
later, my daughter came to me again, looking so grown-up this time that I was
thrown off guard. I learned that she had quietly spent all of her spare time
babysitting and secretly scouring the Internet for information on dog breeds
and breeders and kennel-club rules. Somehow, she who had always let money drift
straight through her fingers and out into the Mall, had managed to save more
than enough money to pay for a show dog. She was so earnest, so sure of
herself, so determined that this dog and this new hobby would finally bring her happiness, keep her
out of trouble in high school, assure her of a place in her new group of nice
friends, and give her the self-confidence that she lacked …. that I caved. One
fateful, late-summer day we brought home a cute little harmless-looking beagle
puppy with a pedigree. His papers said, “The Cowboy in Me,” so she named him
Buck.
To be fair to
my daughter, she did pretty well caring for Buck, and she became quite a
dog-handler, earning blue ribbons and keeping up her hobby throughout high
school. But Buck was also trouble from the minute that we brought him home as a
puppy, and those of you who have met him in my office know that he is now totally
my disaster of a neurotic,
misbehaving dog, ever since my daughter left for college six years ago. He’s
kind of like those kings that are described in our reading from 1 Samuel, a
burden to me and a usurper of freedom, marking everyone’s territory as his own,
quick to steal what does not belong to him and ferociously violent in keeping
what he steals. In fact, I hope that you recognize the dynamics of Israel’s
desire for a king in the conversations with my daughter that I just described.
We can be so sure that we know what is best for us, can’t we? We can make
ourselves so knowledgeable about the things that we want; we can work so hard
to get them, pouring our lives into that desire, praying and begging and
pleading to God, hoping that God will relent like a guilty, loving Parent and
give us what we clamor for—the desires that we are sure will make us happy and
successful and popular and finally as good as our neighbor.
The trouble
is, writes C.S. Lewis, that “[o]ur Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but
too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and
ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to
go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the
offer of a holiday at sea.”[1]
God offers us exhilarating freedom, and we beg for the security of a king; God
offers us a sparkling, unique soul, and we want to be just like our friends. God
offers to transform us with divine fire, and we complain that it hurts. As a
matter of fact, our prayers are often so driven by all of the little things
that we want from God that we fail even to recognize the earth-shattering transformations
that God wants to make in our lives. While my daughter was scheming and
dreaming for that show dog, she never once noticed the devotion of good old
Max, the elderly mutt who followed her faithfully from room to room, waiting
for a pat on the head and wishing for nothing more than to love her with all of
his heart.
In today’s
Gospel lesson, Jesus has come with the power of God to heal, to love, to set us
free, to establish among us the Kingdom of God. Yet even his own family fails
to recognize God’s work in his words and deeds. Instead, they think that Jesus
is crazy, or even acting in the name of Evil itself. He doesn’t look like the
God that they have pictured for themselves; he doesn’t act like the Messiah
that they have been praying for. They are looking straight at pure Goodness,
pouring down upon them from heaven, and they call it Satan. “Heal us! Save us!
Give us what we need!” we cry, too, holding out our arms toward heaven, yet
when God comes to lift us up to lives of joy and meaning, we are too busy bending
over and searching the ground for a path that we can recognize.
C.S. Lewis
writes that, like my insecure teenage daughter, we all want more than anything
“to be acknowledged [in the depths of our souls], to meet with some response, to
bridge some chasm that yawns between [our lonely selves] and reality.” This is
our “inconsolable secret.”[2]
We think that kings and other things will be the bridges that we need, but they
cannot be, because what we hunger for is God. In 2 Corinthians, St. Paul calls
God’s acceptance of us the “eternal weight of glory.” God’s glory, God’s
“welcome [of us] into the heart of things,”[3]
cannot be seen in our eyes or stance, in our successes or in the things that we
so carefully gather around us. God’s glory in us is the undying love with which
God continually sustains us, the love that death cannot kill, the love that
suffering cannot dim. God’s glory in us is the love that ties us to one another
and to the Spirit’s glorious and mysterious presence in the world around us.
I remember
that, when I first read our Gospel from Mark as a teenager, the part about the
eternal and unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit set me to trembling in my
boots. If there was an unforgiveable sin, I sure wanted to understand exactly
what it was, because I knew that I would be just the one to commit it—and then,
oops, I’d be in big trouble! Jesus is not trying to set some kind of an
esoteric trap for us here, however. Jesus is merely stating that we had better
look beyond the surface of things, beyond our expectations, beyond our fears,
to see the Holy Spirit at work in and around us. We had better recognize God’s
glory in ourselves, in our world, and most especially in our fellow human
beings. We had better avoid calling that Glory evil, rejecting it, or ignoring
it. Because if we cannot recognize the Good, then we put ourselves out of reach
of that Goodness. If the Holy Spirit comes to us and we flee, as if from the
Devil, then the Holy Spirit cannot enter into our hearts, and we close
ourselves off from the repentance that leads to forgiveness.
In St. Exupéry’s story of The Little Prince, the Prince, who had left his home planet in
confusion over his love for a very difficult little rose, arrives on a planet
filled with rose bushes. Seeing thousands of blooms that resemble the beloved
rose that he had believed to be unique in the world, he falls into deep despair.
The rose garden, no matter how beautiful, gives no meaning to his world; there
is no special welcome in it. And then a small fox finds the Prince and asks to
be tamed. Day after day, the fox and the Little Prince slowly grow closer until
they become friends. Then the fox shares a secret: “It is only with the heart
that one can see rightly,” he whispers. “What is essential is invisible to the
eyes…. It is the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so
important… You become eternally responsible for what you have tamed. You are
responsible for your rose.”[4]
Perhaps we avoid that “sin against
the Holy Spirit,” too, by taming one
another and our world, by looking for Christ beneath the surface and by taking
responsibility for one another’s flourishing? If God has poured God’s eternal
Glory into each of God’s creatures, then isn’t it by taking the risk of taming
them that we will open ourselves to God? Again, C.S. Lewis writes that “It is a
serious thing …. to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you
talk to may one day [because of God’s glory within them] be a creature which,
if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…It is immortals
whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.”[5]
Even when we ask God for the moon,
ignoring our own best interest, and God says, “No way. No more,” God, out of
infinite love and mercy, relents. In the power of the Holy Spirit, God even
enters into our very being, digging eternity out of time-filled clay. In
return, God asks us to look at the people around us and to see mothers and
brothers and sisters, a family tamed and bound together in love. If I can tame
even my daughter’s crazy beagle, then there is hope for us all.
Anne, you always bring clarity out of confusion. Thank you for another thoughtful essay.
ReplyDeleteJane O'Roark
Thank you - I enjoy re-reading these, they help me a lot!
ReplyDelete