LITURGY AND LIFE

By Anne Strachan

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Oct. 7, 2012

Genesis 2:7, 15, 18-24
Psalm 128
Hebrews 2:9-11
Mark 10:2-16

I long to sit at the kitchen table with Jesus sipping wine (if Jesus preferred, he could sip beer or a cup of tea). I’d like to ask questions, express my fears and doubts. I realize I can offer countless prayers — oblations complete with incense, ornate chalices and flowery (translate: “confusing”) language. However, as a small child once exclaimed, “sometimes I need skin!”

Marsha Jordan, founder of Hugs and Hope Club for Sick Kids, articulates: “People often hear that God loves them . . . But sometimes they need a person ‘with skin on’ to demonstrate that love and make it feel real.” How can we, as followers of Jesus Christ, demonstrate a love that truly reaches the wounded, broken world we all inhabit? Do we open our hearts to this Jesus who often presents us with difficult and unexpected challenges?

For instance, Jesus’ words regarding divorce can seem harsh. Even the disciples take him aside to question him again about it, but he repeats his assertion: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Indeed, a disturbing aspect of our modern culture is the casual shedding of relationships like so much lint. Jesus challenges us when he deems life and its complex relationships to be deep and abiding rather than something to discard when the going gets rough.

And yet, people and relationships aren’t always healthy. Abuse, addiction and plain selfishness can abound within the sacrament of marriage as well as in other callings. Whether we’re married, divorced or happen to be the most outwardly pious pontiff, the fact remains: we’re flawed human beings. But even as we must recognize the sin, do we nonetheless welcome those who have suffered broken relationships into our lives and church communities? Or do we judge them?

Some people, on the surface at least, seem to “have it all together.”

They’re perfectionist in their piety, following rules perfectly; but are they really so very holy? Do they truly welcome those who experience the anguish of a life in turmoil? The psalm says: “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.” We long for such a grace-filled existence. For many, however, this isn’t reality. Divided and traumatized families abound — and again, doesn’t that include all of us on some level? We’re all journeying through an ongoing cycle of sin, hurt, forgiveness and healing in our relationships. Each moment of every day, we rely on God’s love and mercy.

Recently I witnessed a moving and thought-provoking scene: An adult with Down syndrome — manifesting the openness of a little child — shared a heartfelt hug with a dear friend who also happens to be a monk. It was one moment in time; an opportunity to ponder the reality of our current culture, and how it’s widely accepted — even routine — to simply abort a fetus that might have this condition.

In Mark’s Gospel it says: “People were bringing little children to him (perhaps a couple even had Down syndrome) in order that Jesus might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them: for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ ”

And so, as St. Benedict says, we might “begin again” to “listen with the ear of the heart” to the cries of the broken, fragile people in our midst — and this includes ourselves. As we dig down through inevitable mistakes, fears and doubts, it is precisely in this messy ground that we can glimpse an essence of fertility: the transcendent love and abundant mercy of our God.

In Transfiguring Prairie Skies — Stained Glass at Cathedral of the Holy Family, Donald Bolen, bishop of the Diocese of Saskatoon, writes: “. . . Fidelity to our baptism, and the Triune God, does not pull us away from our lives in all their complexity and messiness, does not pull us away from our world in all its brokenness and ragged edges. We needn’t flee the human condition in order to find Christ . . . God knows what it is to be human, and meets us there; faithfulness happens in living deeply as and where we are.”

As we visit and sip wine, beer or tea; as we receive a heartfelt hug from a child-like adult with Down syndrome and a beautiful smile, we might consciously listen and seek God — and God’s son, Jesus — in those persons around us. We might show respect and hospitality to those who are most wounded, just as Jesus did.

Strachan is married with three children and lives in Nakusp, BC. She is a Benedictine Oblate with St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, SK., and a member of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.