joy

The Widow’s Joy

Deacon Douglas McManaman

In this gospel (Lk 7, 11-17), Jesus does what he does best and what he enjoys doing most, which is to raise the dead to life. Some people like playing golf; some people like going fishing, some like camping, but Jesus, he likes raising the dead to life. He raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), he raised Lazarus from the dead, and in this gospel today he raised the only son of the widow of Nain. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him,…” (Eph 2, 4-5). 

Consider too that if a person is dead, he or she cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process; for he’s dead. So, if we are raised (justified), we who were dead in our sins, it was not as a result of anything we might have done. It was all his doing. That’s the God we worship, and that’s the good news. Everything is sheer gift. We don’t have to earn anything. We can’t earn anything. We just have to receive it, which can be difficult. It is difficult to open ourselves up to God’s generosity; we don’t feel we deserve it, and of course we don’t, but that’s besides the point. It’s not about us, but about his love for us. In the letter to the Colossians, we read: “And even when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims,…he removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross” (2, 13-15).

This is important because we have a tendency to slip back into the legalism that forgiveness is conditional upon what we do. But we are not saved by our works; we are saved by Christ’s generosity, his initiative, his incarnation and death on the cross. All our transgressions have been obliterated. The prison doors have been unlocked–we are free to go. No charges are hovering over and against us. If we could only believe that good news, our lives would change radically; we’d be living in the joy of Easter. Confession is not the sacrament in which we suddenly receive the forgiveness that was previously not there; rather, we are given the grace to open ourselves up to the forgiveness that has always been there. It is not God who has a hard time forgiving us; we have a very hard time believing that we’ve been forgiven, and the reason is our awareness that if we were in God’s place, we’d likely forgive very few people, until they earned it in some way. Our limited love keeps us from receiving God’s forgiveness of ourselves. Incidentally, that is why some people would like me or whoever is preaching to preach hard, for they would like the preacher to be a conduit of their anger at the world. That is the kind of Pope some Catholics today would like to see as well.  

But this is a clue to the difference between the saint and the non-saint. It’s not that the one is so holy and the other is not. No, the saints have a profound awareness of their own sinfulness, like the tax collector we heard about last week (Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner), and they admit it–the saint would not think for a second that he or she is a cut above anyone. The difference is that the saint believes the good news and receives it, allows himself or herself to be touched by it. 

There won’t be any sense that we deserve heaven nor any sense that we will be given our rightful due. That wouldn’t be heaven; it is much better than that. Heaven is unimaginable gratitude and joy, and a pale image of that joy might be the joy that the widow received in getting back her only son from the dead. Just consider the pain of losing your only child, and then your child is restored to you. That’s a small taste of the joy of heaven. Think of the sadness we felt after losing someone we were close to: a sibling, a parent, grandparent, a son, daughter, or close friend. We are all going to experience such a loss if we haven’t already, but the good news is that all that we lost will be restored to us. Their happiness, the happiness of those who have died but whom we will see again, will be our own happiness. And our love for God will be made perfect, and so God’s happiness will be our own as well, and if our love for God is perfected, our love for all who belong to him (everyone) will be perfected, and then their happiness will also become our own. It is just not possible to get our heads around the joy that awaits us. This life is precisely about preparing for the joy of heaven, but we prepare for this joy by expanding our capacity to be loved and our capacity to love.

The first reading from Wisdom (3, 1-9) mentions the furnace and the dross. That’s kind of what suffering does to us in our lives, similar to the furnace burning off the dross so that in the end, we are left with pure gold. Human beings seem to be at their worst in times of prosperity, but we are at our best in times of suffering, which is why God allows suffering to enter our lives, that is, in order to shape us, like a blacksmith shapes the iron, by heating and pounding it into a beautiful sword, or whatever is he is making. So when we find ourselves engulfed in darkness and despair, like the widow of Nain would have experienced at the death of her only son, we need to keep in mind that sunrise always follows the darkness and a joy we cannot conceive will soon be ours. 

Joining Humanity and Divinity

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_419homily12.29.2024epiphany.html

Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord
Deacon Douglas McManaman

It is fitting that we exchange gifts at Christmas, because our life in Christ is a gift exchange. He came among us precisely to exchange gifts. Jesus is God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, who joined his divinity to a human nature. In joining a human nature, he joined divinity to humanity. Vatican II pointed out that in joining a human nature, God the Son is intimately present to every man (joined himself to every man, as it were). But he does not force himself upon anyone. His Incarnation is an offer of exchange, and the exchange is: If you give me your humanity, I will give you my divinity.  

Jesus is both human and divine, and he offers us the opportunity to become both human and divine; for it was St. Athanasius who said: “God became man so that man might become god”.

Parents who have their children baptized carry out this exchange; parents offer their children on their behalf. They give to Christ the humanity of their child, and in return, Christ gives that child his divinity. The result is that the child leaves the Church a different creature than when he or she arrived. That child has been deified, divinized, filled with divine grace (theosis). That child is human, but at the same time more than human. That child shares in the divine nature, and so he or she is more than human without ceasing to be human, and as a result that child has capacities that he or she would not have without divine grace, such as the power to believe what Christ has revealed about himself (faith), the capacity to hope for eternal life, and the power to love God intimately, as an intimate friend between whom secrets are shared. None of this is possible without divine grace. And of course, the child receives the 7 personal gifts of the Holy Spirit, as seeds that will unfold as the child continues to grow in faith. And there’s no doubt in my mind that parents for the most part have no idea the good they are doing for their children and for the world in offering their children for baptism. They have a sense that this is a good thing, because they arrange for baptism, even when they are not fully practicing the faith themselves. But they don’t fully realize how much good they are doing for their children and for the world in doing so.

That is the exchange that Christ offers us. I will give you my divinity if you give me your humanity, and it is a giving that we have to renew for the rest of our lives, because we tend to drift away from him over the course of the years. We tend to get caught up in things that ultimately don’t matter; we get distracted by fear and the lures of pleasure, power, and money, and sin blinds the mind to a certain degree, which allows us to veer away even further. And if we are reflective enough, we become aware of an increasing emptiness–these things don’t fulfill us, and the reason is that we became a “son of God”, deified, divinized, sharers in the divine nature. That’s our deepest identity. In 1920, army chaplain and poet G. Studdert Kennedy wrote: 

If I am the son of God, nothing but God will satisfy my soul; no amount of comfort, no amount of ease, no amount of pleasure, will give me peace or rest. If I had the full cup of all the world’s joys held up to me, and could drain it to the dregs, I should still remain thirsty if I had not God. If the feast of all the good things of life, pleasures and powers that have been and that are, could be laid out before me and I could eat it all at one meal, I should still be hungry if I had not God. Nor would it satisfy my soul, if I could be assured of an infinite extension of this present life at its best, apart from God. If the feast of this life’s goods could last forever, yet would I start up from the table satiated but still unsatisfied, because I had not God. There is not enough in ten material worlds to satisfy a fully-developed human soul–I must have communion with God. Whatever tends to break that communion is an enemy of mine, however much it may pretend to be a friend. However stubbornly I may stick to the delusion that I can live without Him, however closely I may cling to the idol that I put up in His place, sooner or later, in this world or in the next, the idols and delusions will have to go.

There is another side to this exchange. In joining his divinity to our humanity, Christ joined the divine joy to the suffering of our humanity, and this is something we can experience as well. If I am a son of God, if Christ’s divinity is joined to my own humanity as a result of my own willing acceptance of that divinity, and if I have made some progress in the spiritual life, then I can sense the joy of that divinity in the midst of suffering, especially physical suffering. Although the suffering is horrible, whether it is a kidney stone, a painful illness, or the pain of dying of old age, at the very core of one’s being, there is joy. Not exhilaration, not exuberance, but a tiny and subtle flame of joy suffering cannot touch or extinguish, only illuminate. In my experience with dying patients, it is always those with real faith who, although they are experiencing some agony, have not lost charity, but are still full of gratitude, still thoughtful, still good natured. This is rarely the case with people who are dying. There is a clear difference between dying patients who have lived a life of faith, hope, and charity throughout their lives, and those who seemed to have refused the divine exchange.

And so there is really nothing to fear when it comes to pain and suffering, if we have given our humanity to him. At the deepest center of our nature, we will detect the divine light, which illuminates and brings a degree of warmth in the midst of that suffering, so that the suffering does not overwhelm us with fear and despair.