The Grace to be Biblical Infants
A key sentence in the gospel for Saturday, the 26th week of Ordinary Time, is this: “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”
Which leaves us with the question, how can we be infants in a biblical sense?
Franciscan Richard Rohr provides us with an interesting and profound answer. There are only two things which can break open our hearts, transform our character, and lead us to true humility: great love, and great suffering.
Great love transforms us into humble disciples by taking the attention off ourselves. That is what the experience of falling in love does to those who, until that happens, tend to be only focused on themselves: their life, their career, their pleasures, their desires. Suddenly, they fall in love, and all they can think of and talk about, is their beloved. They have been forced out of themselves by love.
The challenge for us all, and our greatest failing, is to truly believe, and experience from the heart, how loved we are by God. Theologian Karl Rahner’s insight concerning the words of Jesus on the Cross is profound: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Rahner contends that they did know what they were doing – they were killing an innocent man. Pilate knew that; the Roman soldiers knew that, even the religious leaders knew that – they were just jealous and threatened by Jesus who condemned their false pride and their addiction to possessions, prestige and power. What they did not know, Rahner concludes, is how much God loved them!
Great suffering works in just the opposite way – by putting the attention on us, but as humbling self-awareness of our own weakness and powerlessness. For Jesus, the special quality of a child is not just their innocence; it is the awareness of how totally helpless and dependent on others they are.
Great suffering is often the only thing that will force us to our knees, become aware of how powerless we are to deal with some obstacle in our live, and turn to God, sometimes in desperation, to ask for help. We are forced to make the longest painful journey of our lives, facing our false self that has helped us survive, and then hopefully come closer to our true self, totally dependent on God. Ron Rolheiser OMI equates this journey with living our purgatory now – purgatory defined as the “pain of entering heaven, and a letting go of the things of the earth.”
When Jesus in the passage above advised the disciples not to rejoice that the spirits submit to them, he is telling them not to be proud of the healing work they have done through the power he gave them, but rather to rejoice in that they have been humble, believed in him and who he is, and in their powerlessness, received his power to work within them. So that is why their names are written in heaven, not because of what they have done, but because there were biblical children allowing his love and power to transform them.
So let us take this passage to heart, as Oblates and lay associates celebrating 200 years of our founder St. Eugene’s love for God and for us. Let us pray for a greater awareness of how loved we are by God, and for a greater self-awareness of how dependent we are on that love, so that we can also rejoice with Jesus as biblical infants, beloved sons and daughters of God.
By +Sylvain Lavoie, OMI