I of course knew better. I knew that a dog wouldn’t solve all her problems. I didn’t want a new puppy to end up as my responsibility, either, just like our other dog, and the rabbit, and the gerbils, and the hermit crabs…. But my daughter was undeterred. She argued and argued with me. She spent every free minute scouring the Internet for information on dog breeds and kennel-club rules. Somehow, she, who had always let money drift straight through her fingers, 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 …. that I caved. One fateful, late-summer’s day we brought home a cute, harmless-looking beagle puppy with a pedigree. His papers said, “The Cowboy in Me,” so my daughter named him “Buck.”
Buck was trouble from the minute that we brought him home. Despite my daughter’s research and even with visits to a canine psychologist (!) Buck turned out very much like those kings that are described in our reading from 1 Samuel: He was a burden to our family and a usurper of freedom. He marked everyone’s territory as his own. He was quick to steal what didn’t belong to him. He was ferociously violent in keeping what he stole, snapping at friend and foe alike. Everyone who met him was shocked that a dog could get into this much trouble. Now, Buck crossed the Rainbow Bridge many years ago, but when a Facebook memory of him came up this year on my feed, I got responses from old friends that I hadn’t heard from in years, each with their own “Buck disaster story” to add.
Like my daughter, and like the people of Israel in the days of Samuel, we can be so sure that we know what it is that we long for. 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 loving Parent and give us what we clamor for. The trouble is, our prayers are often so driven by all of the things that we want from God that we fail to recognize the earth-shattering transformations that God wants to make in our lives. God offers us exhilarating freedom, and we beg for the security of a king; God offers us a sparkling, unique self, and we want to be just like others. God offers to transform us with divine fire, and we shrink back in fear. God pours out love and glory upon us, and we don’t even notice. While my daughter was scheming and dreaming for that show dog, she never once noticed the devotion of good old Max, our elderly family mutt. Poor Max followed her faithfully from room to room each day, waiting only for a pat on the head and wishing for nothing more than to love her with all of his heart.
In a sermon on today’s epistle, C.S. Lewis writes that what we all want more than anything is to be acknowledged, praised, and loved. We want to “meet with some response,” from the universe, “to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality.” Lewis calls this universal longing our “inconsolable secret.”[1] We think that kings or puppies will be the bridges that we need, but they can’t be, because what we hunger for is God’s undying love. In 2 Corinthians, St. Paul calls God’s loving acceptance of us the “eternal weight of glory.” God’s glory, God’s gift that “welcome[s us] into the heart of things,”[2] can’t be seen in our eyes or our stance, in our successes or in the things that we so carefully gather around us. God’s glory in us is the eternal love with which God continually sustains us, the love that death can’t kill, the love that suffering can’t dim. God’s glory in us ties us to one another and to the Spirit’s mysterious presence in the world around us. “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,” explains Lewis, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses … [I]n him also Christ … the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”[3]
When I first read our Gospel from Mark as an anxious teenager, the part about the eternal and unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit worried me to no end. 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! Jesus isn’t trying to set some kind of hidden trap for us in this passage, though. Jesus is emphatically pointing out that we’d better look beyond the surface of things, beyond our expectations, beyond our fears, so that we can recognize the Holy Spirit at work. As Bishop Owensby points out, we can’t receive God’s outpouring of love without allowing that love to transform us, to transfigure us “into who we truly yearn to be: the kind of person who loves from the depths of our enduring character.”[4]
In today’s Gospel lesson, you see, Jesus has come with the power of God to heal, to love, to set us free, to reveal God’s Kingdom among us. Yet even his own family fails to recognize God’s work in Jesus’ words and deeds. Instead, they worry that he’s gone too far, that he’s lost touch with every-day reality. The religious authorities accuse him of acting in the name of Evil itself. Jesus doesn’t look like the savior that they’ve pictured for themselves; he doesn’t act like the Messiah that they’ve been praying for. He threatens the status quo; he threatens their authority. In Jesus’ healings and teachings, the scribes are looking straight at pure divine glory, pouring down upon them from heaven, but they call it Satan.
We, too, cry out to God: “Heal us! Save us! Give us what we need!” We hold out our arms toward heaven, yet when God comes to lift us up to lives of joy and meaning, we’re too busy bending over and searching the ground for a path that we recognize. 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’s no special welcome in it. And then a small fox finds the Prince and asks to be tamed. For the fox, to tame is to create an eternal connection with another creature. It’s to become unique, though love, for the other. It takes time, patience, and responsibility. 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 truly see,” he whispers. “What is essential is invisible to the eyes….”[5]
Perhaps we avoid that “sin against the Holy Spirit,” then, by taming and being tamed, by allowing eternal connections with God and one another, by looking for Christ beneath the surface and by taking responsibility for one another’s flourishing? In the power of the Holy Spirit, God enters into our very being, digging eternity out of time-filled clay. God sees us, and loves us, and wants to give us life and joy everlasting. Shall we turn away unseeing? Shall we remain in a closed-off world, with meaning always a distant mirage? Or shall we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit? Shall we look at our neighbors and see, yes see, not strangers, but beloved parents and siblings, a glorious family in Christ, tamed and bound together forever? You know, if I could learn to tame even my daughter’s crazy beagle—and yes, to be tamed by him, as well—then perhaps there’s hope for us all.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 1965), 11.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 15.
[4] Jake Owensby, “Is Anything Unforgivable?” Found at The Cottage, https://open.substack.com/pub/dianabutlerbass/p/sunday-musings-afd?r=1ir6u8&utm_medium=ios.
[5] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Paris : Gallimard, 1946), 72. (My translation).
