All is Gift

Saturday was Kathy’s birthday, and on Sunday she wanted to take a half-hour drive to our friend Fr. Norm Dixon’s parish for Mass.  A Jesuit friend from Detroit, he had often told us we’d love the congregation at St. Aloysius.  We did.  And they loved him.

One of the things Norm does here as he did in Detroit is to memorize the Gospel and tell it like the story that it is.  He’s a great teller of stories, with animated face, gesturing hands, and lots of vocal inflection, so his proclamation of the Good News has a ring of authenticity to it.  The story was Luke chapter 7, the woman with a reputation washing Jesus’ feet.  Jesus was having dinner with some Pharisees – rule-followers – when the woman came in and washed Jesus feet, drying them with her hair and anointing them with perfume, kissing them repeatedly.  One of the Pharisees accused him of inappropriate behavior for letting her waste perfume on his feet and for letting her touch him.  There was an act of love and reverence and respect going on, and here was an accusation, trying to sully it.

How do we feel when we are accused?  I feel defensive, then angry or ashamed.  All of these are negative emotional states.  How do we feel when we are affirmed, treated with love, reverence, respect?  I feel pretty darned positive.  In his homily, Norm raised this contrast, mentioning that one of the names given to the Evil Spirit is “The Accuser.”  Accusation, he said, challenges us to fight for our dignity, places on us the burden of having to earn our worth in an uphill battle.    

Affirmation, on the other hand, finds in us the innate value that we need not earn. So often, “Faith” and “Religion” are turned into codes of rules, and questions about them tend to be accusations, challenges to our life choices, threats that we need to dig ourselves out of the hole that we’ve gotten ourselves into, and we better get cracking.  And here was Norm, holding out another option.  “All is gift” he said.  Our lives are spent not in desperate efforts to earn love that we want, but in gratitude for the love that we have been freely given.

After the Mass, Norm encouraged us to go to the social hall for coffee and donuts.  "You're gonna love 'em," he said.  The room was full of smiling people, enjoying the goodies on the overflowing pot-luck table – fruit salads, sweet breads, muffins, cookies – and sharing happy conversation.  They knew we were guests, old friends of their new pastor, and they let us know how much they loved him.  They told us how much better parish life was since he came, how grateful they were for that.  They told us what a gift he was.   “He’s so human” they said.  He’s not up there (accusing?); he’s just one of us.”  "We love 'im."  And they took us over to the table.  "Help yourself!  We've got plenty!"

Tomorrow - accepting gifts

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.