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In Victoria,
British Columbia, there used to be a vast expanse of land that, from all
outward appearances, was abandoned, uninhabitable, and useless. All of
its chief resource, the granite buried beneath the topsoil, had been
quarried. Where a verdant prairie once existed, all that remained were
the scars that had been blasted onto the walls of what now was a deep,
cavernous, barren, and dangerous void that humans beings had carved into
the earth.
One day, however, a
woman with a far-reaching vision determined that this desolate area
could produce “fruit.” Out of this seemingly lifeless void eventually
emerged what today is one of the most beautiful outdoor and indoor
gardens in the world, Butchart Gardens. Blossoms, fruit, and foliage of
seemingly countless varieties of plants, shrubs, flowers, and trees
grace what was once a desolate area sculpted through decades of blasting
and stone cutting. Birds from various habitats—including the
tropics—make their home at Butchart Gardens. Visitors can walk the
garden’s trails and view nature’s beauty in all of its resplendence.
It’s a little like walking back into the Garden of Eden.
That once useless
tract of land in Victoria is very much like us, especially when we find
ourselves completely used up, worn out, and empty. Where there once was
a youngster’s innocence, sin has sapped our desire to be heroically
virtuous. Some of us may even find ourselves believing that there’s
nothing to hope in or to hope for.
Having embraced sin
as a lifestyle—and it doesn’t matter what our sins are because the
effect is the same for them all—we struggle to keep the void we’ve
blasted and carved into our hearts concealed from God and from others as
well, convinced we are unworthy of God’s
love as well as the love of all those other people we’ve wronged whether
in word or in action. We’re like Adam and Eve, covered in fig leaves
and hiding in the bushes, when all God wanted to do with them (and with
us) was simply to talk with them like He always had. We’re also like
Moses as we cover our faces and turn away at the very moment God is most
present.
But, like the
vinedresser Jesus taught about in today’s gospel parable describing the
fig tree, God hasn’t given up on us…yet. Even when we may be inclined
to or have already given up on ourselves, God knows we can still bear
abundant fruit by fulfilling the personal vocation he has entrusted to
each and every one of us. All that’s
needed is a little “hoeing” and “manuring.”
Looking back to last
Lent, God has blessed us with yet another year. Maybe we don’t
need to do the hoeing and manuring right now because maybe
God will bless us with another year. But, maybe He won’t. Who’s
to know? What
we do know is that time is finite and our lives are terminal. We’re
mortal after all and sooner or later, we will run out of time to do the
hoeing and manuring and, instead, be relegated to, if not forgotten by,
human history.
No matter how much
time we have left, today’s gospel reminds us that some “hoeing” and
“manuring”—that we respond wholeheartedly to God’s call to repentance—is
needed so that our inner beauty, the heroic virtue God breathed into our
souls when He created us, will take root and flourish in that unknown
number of days we have left, however few or many they may be.
Lent provides the
time and the opportunity to dig into our lives and allow the Holy Spirit
to enlighten us about what needs to be turned over, cultivated, and
fertilized so that we might be more fruitful in terms of living out our
personal vocations by exhibiting heroic virtue and offering our lives to
others as a “light to the nations.” Then, like Moses when he was asked
by the Hebrew wanderers, “Who is God?” and responded “I am,” we too
needn’t fear offering our lives as an exemplary model that inspires and
challenges others to imitate. After all, that’s what St. Paul told us
to do in last week’s epistle!
I believe that one
of the best places to begin this “hoeing” and “manuring” is by asking
ourselves: “Where do I believe God is least present in my life?”
To pinpoint where
there seems to be no life, no future, and no hope is to isolate those
places where God may be most present if I am but willing to allow the
Holy Spirit to help me to see with God’s eyes, to open myself to God’s
creative potential, and to stop turning and running away from what
appears on the surface to be nothing but a deep, cavernous, barren, and
dangerous void blasted and carved not somewhere into a prairie in
British Columbia but blasted and carved through my own free choices into
my own heart.
This is precisely
what happened to Moses who, after repenting, accepted his personal
vocation and found himself communicating with the Lord face to face. In
contrast, when the Lord communicated with Adam and Eve after they
disobeyed the Lord’s only command, the two of them stubbornly refused to
repent. I guess we all are their progeny!
Repentance, then,
doesn’t just mean “feeling sorry for our sins,” although we may feel
very sorry for blasting and carving that void which we thought would
provide everything we want but, in reality, has left us feeling
desperate, desolate, and cold, like a cadaver in the coroner’s
refrigerator…a
body devoid of its animating spirit. But, according to today’s gospel,
feeling sorry for our sins is only half of the equation.
Repentance also
requires something more difficult and challenging, namely, changing how
we think about everything. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians about this
difficult challenge in today’s Epistle when he suggested that repentance
also involves making a personal decision full of conviction and
commitment to change the direction of our lives. “…Whoever thinks he is
standing secure should take care not to fall,” is how St. Paul reminded
the Corinthians about their need to repent.
The work of “hoeing”
and “manuring,” then, also includes the willingness to make that deep,
radical change in how we look at ourselves, our relationship to God, and
everyone and everything else around us. Perhaps some of us may need a
back hoe because we require assistance to fill in where we’ve
continually blasted and carved away—hoping to strike happiness and bliss
over the years and decades—but only finding that we’ve struck emptiness
and self-inflicted pain!
The most difficult
step, I believe, is to take the first step, namely, to change how we
look at ourselves. It is difficult because it requires that we
honestly assess ourselves, forgive ourselves, and set about living as we
know God has created us to live.
However, what
happens all too often when we survey that deep, cavernous, barren, and
dangerous void that we’ve blasted and carved into our hearts is that we
experience varying degrees of despair. Not only do we feel ashamed and
embarrassed for the choices we’ve made and what we’ve done with our
lives and to the lives of others as well. We also feel mortified
at what God and other people must think of us. Where once there was
life, we’ve introduced tumult and chaos which has led to pain and death,
especially the death of many relationships, including perhaps a most
basic relationship, our relationship with ourselves.
If we can’t love and
forgive ourselves, we rationalize, how could God or anyone else forgive
us?
The problem with
this rationalization is that it stems from the fact that we’re feeling
guilty.
I once read a gem of
a book by Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, who noted that
there’s a world of difference between “feeling guilty” and “experiencing
guilt.”
Feeling guilty is an
emotional response we have when we live in mortal fear that someone will
find out something we’ve done that we know is objectively wrong. We
know what true motives and fear, if these are exposed in the light of
day, being embarrassed and ashamed. So Watts calls feeling guilty “unjustified
self-disapproval” because we fear the disapproval that will come
from outside and beyond ourselves—whether that’s God or other people
around us—and the embarrassment and shame that will accompany this
awareness.
People who feel
guilty are fearful of disapproval from outside of themselves, from other
people, and from God. They are embarrassed because they fear being
“found out.” They also spend a lot of time and energy worrying
more about what others may think about them than they do about what it
means to be an example of heroic virtue for others to imitate. Then,
their pride keeps them from exposing themselves to others—especially in
the Sacrament of Penance—because they fear that others will judge them
precisely in the way they’ve already judged themselves. They’re
suffering from a form of what I call “spiritual schizophrenia,” namely,
estranged from themselves on the inside yet desperately attempting to be
pleasing to those they’ve wronged on the outside.
As an aside, I
believe that is precisely why so many Catholics don’t go to the
Sacrament of Penance. While they don’t believe they were immaculately
conceived, they’ve judged themselves guilty of sin and don’t want this
judgment validated by anyone outside of themselves. From this point of
view, confession exists simply to condemn sinful behavior and to
reinforce feeling guilty about oneself and one’s decisions.
And so, people who
feel guilty carry that deep, cavernous, barren, and dangerous void
they’ve blasted and carved into of their hearts around with them like a
big, heavy weight on their backs. They live each day worrying that
someone will find them out and expose their deceit from behind their fig
leaves as well as demand taht they come out from the beautiful bushes
they’ve decided to hide in. And, when others “out” people who feel
guilty, they point the finger of blame everywhere else but at
themselves. Yes, indeed, Adam and Eve did feel very guilty for
disobeying God and their subsequent behavior proves it beyond the shadow
of any doubt.
Experiencing guilt
is altogether different. Watts notes that guilt is the natural
consequence—almost an automatic, unconditioned neural response, if you
will—of making a conscious choice to examine ourselves, our actions, and
our motives. We certainly should experience guilt when we discover that
we’ve acted in ways we know to be objectively wrong. This should
also make us quite angry with ourselves if only because we know that we
haven’t lived up to the standard of morality and decency that God has
breathed into each of us. But, rather than feeling guilty and trying to
hide beyond fig leaves and by jumping into the bushes or covering our
face and turning away in fear and shame, we decide to amend our
ways…that “firm purpose of amendment” we learned about when we were
second graders preparing for our first confession.
People who
experience guilt, then, really don’t care all that much what other
people think about them because people who experience guilt are
disgusted with themselves for the sinful choices they have made. This
is why Watts calls the experience of guilt “justified
self-disapproval.” The experience of guilt, then, is a very good
thing because the disapproval we have of ourselves comes from deep
within—from the Spirit of God moving in our souls—and not from
without—from the fear we have concerning what others may think about us.
People who
experience guilt disapprove of themselves and rightly so! They are
angry for failing to live as they know they ought to live and for making
some very bad choices which have resulted in the deep, cavernous,
barren, and dangerous void they’ve blasted and carved into their hearts
and now behold. In short, they see the mess they’ve made of their
lives. The experience of guilt shocks them back from their fantasy
world into reality as they behold what they’ve done and how they’ve
estranged themselves not only from themselves but from God and from
others as well. And, in the midst of this very painful realization,
they fall to their knees as if their legs have been cut out from beneath
them.
Yet, something else
is operating when people experience guilt, something completely
different from the situation when people feel guilty.
So, what’s the
difference?
God is present in
the desolation those who experience guilt feel and, in this experience
God fortifies them with heroic virtue, and especially the virtues of
humility, hope, and honesty. These are the heroic virtues that
strengthen those who experience guilt as they repent from their sin and
set about with a firm purpose of amendment to rectify their
relationships with first with themselves and, then, with God and
others. Yes, these people do experience embarrassment when they confess
their sins; but, they persist because humility and hope are filling the
void they’ve blasted and carved into their hearts over the years and
decades. People who experience guilt “out” themselves and, unlike Adam
and Eve, point the finger of blame straight at themselves because the
virtue of honesty is now fortifying their humility and hope. God
lifts the burden of guilt that they’ve
borne for weeks, years, or decades, assists them to stand up straight,
and speaks with them face to face, just as He did with Moses.
The experience of
guilt allows heroic virtue to fill the void in their hearts of people
who have sinned and, as they survey the change that comes from the
experience of guilt, they clearly see how God is restoring their hearts
to their original condition, one that is more prayerful and less
comfortable, more forgiving and less materialistic, more honest and less
selfish, more caring and less arrogant. The pathway of truth—despite
what others may think—leads those who experience guilt to this
conversion of heart.
All of this presents
a paradox because our culture tells us precisely the opposite. We’re
told that feeling guilty is a “cop out.” Go ahead and just “do it,”
television, radio commercials, and psychologists tell us because, it is
implied “there will be no consequences.” But, for those who are
attentive to scripture and Church teaching, it is eminently clear that
the experience of guilt is a very good thing! Don’t go ahead and do it
because there will be consequences, the worst of which is estrangement
from our very self, from God, and from others.
Lent is not simply
about doing more—more fasting, more abstaining, more
almsgiving—but about doing better, especially as repentance
enables us to experience guilt and motivates us to engage in the very
difficult and challenging work of changing how we think about ourselves.
Because God has
given us so much in creating us in His divine image and likeness, we
innately bear within us the capacity for heroic virtue even if we aren’t
the most talented, most intelligent, most beautiful, richest, or most
powerful person on the face of the earth. All of those qualities pale
when compared to heroic virtue. We innately bear within us the capacity
for heroic virtue despite the fact that we have sinned. The parable of
the vinedresser we heard in today’s gospel reminds us that God has given
us the gift of time—we don’t know how much time—to “hoe” and to “manure”
where desolation appears.
Like the blossoms,
fruit, and foliage of numerous varieties of plants, shrubs, flowers, and
trees gracing Butchart Gardens, heroic virtue will emerge from the deep,
cavernous, barren, and dangerous void we’ve created when we respond to
God’s call to repentance, as we open ourselves to experience guilt, and
as we allow the heroic virtues of humility, hope, and truth to fill in
the void we’re blasted and carved into our hearts over the weeks, years,
or decades.
The tone of urgency
in today’s scripture reminds us not to delay the hard and challenging
work of repentance because God wants us to flourish in whatever amount
of time we have left. Yes, our lives are limited and time is finite.
We certainly are going to run out of time, some of us sooner than
others. We know that we’ve already been given another year to repent.
Who among us knows if we will have another year to repent?
Our personal
vocation—the one God breathed into our souls when He created us—is not
to be great in the eyes of the world but to be great in God’s eyes. We
are not Moses, one of the prophets, or Jesus, but God did create us in
His own divine image and likeness. But, like Moses, the prophets, and
Jesus, when we say “Yes” to our personal vocation, we open ourselves to
God’s grace. This is what will perfect us as God returns us to the
perfect state in which He created us.
As we open ourselves
to God’s grace and as we allow the heroic virtues to flourish in what
was a cavernous void we’ve blasted away and carved into our hearts, we
also will become a beautiful garden, like Butchart Garden, “quality”
people whose lives of heroic virtue will serve as a source of
inspiration, example, and challenge for others. |
HOMILY
