LITURGY AND LIFE

By Bernadette Gasslein

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Oct. 14, 2012

Wisdom 7:7-11
Psalm 90
Hebrews 4:12-13
Mark 10:17-30

If you had to name the industry that harnesses human creativity to the max today, what would you pick?

I’d pick the advertising industry. While some ads are banal or boring, many, if not most, are exciting, tantalizing and engaging. We only have to spend an evening watching the annual compilation of the World’s Best Commercials to see how in tune with the human spirit advertising is. Advertisers know the multifaceted longings of our hearts; they can make us laugh, evoke tears and tap into fears; they claim to know what will satisfy our restlessness. They know our inner anxieties and hopes so well that they can sell us what we don’t need, make us want what we can’t use and keep us emptying our wallets or amassing credit card debt in response to their lures. They can make us feel poor when we are actually rich, and empty when we are satiated.

“Fill us with your love, O Lord, that we may rejoice and be glad.” The psalmist today invites us to pray these words, not just during the liturgy, but also throughout the week, to let them become a mantra that our lips murmur day in and day out. The psalmist invites us to find our deepest desires, and to fill them with, paradoxically, what can only be poured out, the love of God.

The Wisdom writer names what might be commonly thought of as “wealth”: sceptres and thrones (power and position); priceless gems; gold and silver; health and beauty. Advertising continues to market all of these in a thousand different guises. It might seem that humanity hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Our desires are so strong, yet so fickle. And, truth to tell, none of what attracts us is bad. But it is not the path to treasure in heaven.

That’s the dilemma that the rich young man finds himself facing. Jesus asks him to relinquish the conventional wisdom that maps out the direct route to eternal life; he dares him to go beyond what seems to guarantee him eternal reward, and to let go of everything. Imagine! He’s gone to church every Sunday (well, almost), gone to confession, given to the annual Share Lent collection, been good to his aging parents and never once had even a straying thought in his marriage. And now Jesus, loving him, asks him to create in his life a completely new space where this lad will entrust himself to God alone. Put yourself in his shoes. God will be your only security. Ironically, Jesus asks the young man to sell everything, then give away the money he amassed from what he sold. That empty-handedness, that empty wallet, that emptiness = treasure. The math is completely illogical by all the standards we know. Empty yourself of what fills you and you will find fullness of life.

If there is any marketing campaign that we need to turn over to the best in the industry, it would be that invitation. I’d be fascinated to see how they would create what, in effect, would be an anti-ad. This is the industry that has shaped us from the time we are children (the most important “new” market is six to 18-month-old children). We are hardly aware of it. They have been in the business of filling our hearts and imaginations since we emerged from our mothers’ wombs — and here Jesus is asking us today to let it all go, to let but one thing fill us: him.
“Fill us with your love, O Lord, that we may rejoice and be glad.” What if, this week, every time we hear or see an ad — whether online, on the radio, on TV, on a billboard on the way to work, on a bus that we take to college, in the washroom of our university — we prayed that one line of the psalm? What if we let ourselves be shocked by Jesus’ loving request, as was the rich young man, for most of us, like him, have many possessions? What if we were to practice active resistance to the lures offered us every day, beginning in small ways to enlarge the space in our hearts, and to help us trust more deeply in God’s love and God’s wisdom than in anything we can own or acquire?

Each Sunday’s eucharist enables us to experience this self-emptying. For, in thanksgiving, the eucharist invites us to surrender ourselves to God. This is our “thanksgiving sacrifice.” In response for all that God has given us, we have nothing to give but ourselves — when all our “stuff” is gone, when everything we’ve worked hard for is counted up, Jesus points out that there’s something more that God wants: our selves, whole and entire. That is what Jesus gave in response to the Father’s love, and that is all — all — he asks of us. He asks us to trust God alone. Filled with God’s love, singing for joy, he too pours out what he has received, emptying himself. He asks us to discern riches and to hand back our best wealth — ourselves — to God. With nothing left but our naked selves, we are laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. No advertiser can dare promise that any product will offer the return Jesus offers: a hundredfold and eternal life. And there’s no manipulation: “but with persecutions.” Gulp. Fill us with your love, O Lord . . .

A few centuries ago St. Ignatius of Loyola grappled with the same dilemma. He penned a prayer, his famous Suscipe Prayer that helps us rehearse this self-surrender and trust. Think of what each line surrenders; some of these may be more precious than wealth:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding
and my entire will,
all I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours: do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

Gasslein is the editor of Celebrate!, Canada’s award-winning pastoral magazine published by Novalis. For the past 40 years she has been engaged in various liturgical and catechetical ministries, leading workshops around the country. Gasslein holds a Licence in Sacred Theology with Specialization in Pastoral Catechetics from the Institut catholique de Paris. She and her husband live in Edmonton.