It’s
getting pretty close to that time of year called “Spring Cleaning.”
I know this because I pruned the crepe myrtles on Thursday afternoon
and noticed new growth just beginning to show on the branches.
That’s how I know almost infallibly that spring is “just around the
corner.”
Within a couple of weeks, we’ll be opening the windows during the
daytime, letting in the all of the sun and fresh air, dusting all of
the goldenrod pollen from the furniture, washing the floors, and
vacuuming the carpets. But, that’s just the beginning of this
annual ritual. Dusting and vacuuming is one thing. There’s also
organizing all of the accumulated clutter and disposing of (or
donating to charities) items that have outlived their usefulness or
grown too small to be useful to us anymore unless we go on a
long-term diet. When we complete this annual ritual, the closets
will be neatly arranged. The furniture and flooring will glisten in
the sun. And, everything will be in its proper place…and, by that,
I don’t mean “having been put out in the garage.”
Like our homes, our lives also require an annual spring cleaning.
Perhaps our ritual includes getting a physical, visiting the
dentist, or re-engaging in some exercise regimen, even if it’s just
taking a good walk a couple of times each week. Spring is a great
time to take a bike ride along the Schuylkill River a couple of
times each week.
Yet, as neat as our homes and lives may be, this doesn’t
necessarily mean that our spiritual lives are in proper order, just
as all of that accumulated stuff in the garage doesn’t necessarily
mean that we’ve completed the annual spring cleaning or our
apparently good health doesn’t mean we don’t need a physical.
Slowly over time, pernicious attitudes can creep in and clutter up
our souls, to the point that we don’t even see all that has piled
up. This mound can become so humungous that it actually keeps us
from seeing anything but the mound and, even though we may pattern
our days according to the Ten Commandments (eight of which we heard
in today’s first reading), we’re
just not growing spiritually.
In
today’s gospel, we heard a familiar story, that of Jesus cleansing
the Temple. The story draws our attention to Jesus’ righteous anger
on display at the Temple―what
Jesus calls his “Father’s house”―because
the Temple has been turned into a marketplace. The business being
transacted in the Temple’s outer precincts wasn’t in and of itself
evil; in fact, those transactions were necessary for worship in the
Temple. But, as with most things human beings dream up or invent,
the “law of unintended consequences” likely came into play, and
those transactions got way out of hand, a for-profit enterprise
rather than providing assistance for worship. What originally was
quite acceptable grew far beyond the good originally intended and
ended up offending anyone who possessed religious sensibility. So
far out of hand, in fact, that Jesus found it necessary to cleanse
the Temple, that is, to get things back to the way God intended for
the Sabbath and Temple in and from the beginning.
Considering today’s gospel from this perspective, what is important
is not the fact that Jesus cleansed the Temple, as important as that
may be. Instead, what we need to focus upon is what motivated Jesus
to cleanse the Temple, because that motivation provides a standard
for us to understand better and to judge the current state of our
spiritual lives. Then, we can make a more accurate assessment
concerning the amount of spiritual cleansing we need if we are to
get back to being the person God created us to be in and from the
beginning.
So, today’s question is: “What motivated Jesus to cleanse the
Temple?” The gospel itself provides the answer: “Zeal for God’s
house will consume me.”
If
anyone of us is to be cleansed spiritually, we need to consider
those attitudes that seemed good when we first adopted them, but
have grown over time into a mound that now not only clutters up our
spiritual life to the point that we don’t even see what has piled up.
It is sort of
like a mound of
dirty clothes and bathroom linens piling up in a bedroom that
someone doesn’t even see, even though the pile blocks the way to the
bathroom. What I am drawing attention to is worse, however.
This mound
of
attitudes we have adopted has become so humongous that it is
impossible for us to grow spiritually. You know those kinds of
attitudes, the “If I knew then what I know now, I’d never have done
that. But, I didn’t...” kinds of attitudes.
One attitude many of us knowingly or unknowingly has adopted is
“secularism.” What this means is that we keep God out of our daily
lives. I’m not talking simply about things like failing to say
daily prayers, not to read spiritual literature, or not to perform
good works on behalf of other people. Failing to do those things
certainly keeps God out of our daily lives. Rather, the type of
secularism I am discussing roots itself more deeply in our souls and
has everything to do with what motivates us. That is, having
adopted secularism as an attitude, does “zeal for God’s house”
motivate everything we say and do each and every day?
Quite likely, zeal for God’s house doesn’t motivate everything we
say and do each and every day. In and of itself, that is not
unusual. But, since I’m talking today about engaging in spiritual
housecleaning, the question is: “Why not?” Might it be because
secularism has become so influential in our lives that, for all
practical purposes, it has become a
“mound”
that
blocks out the possibility for a place for God in our lives? You
know, the “I’m too busy” attitude or the “There’s simply no time in
the day (or week)” attitude.
We
can very easily assess the degree of secularism and lack of zeal for
God’s house present in our lives. The easiest way is to listen to
how, in our own words, we typically describe other people’s
motives. For example, how often do we question their motives,
attributing to these people the worst possible motives? This
attitude flows forth from our mouths when we say things like: “I
know why she did that. Well, the best I can say is, ‘At least she’s
consistent’.” Or: “He’s always been like that. What else could you
expect. I knew it from day one?”
Just this past week, Pope Benedict XVI responded to the secular
media who had misjudged his motives and caused great amount of harm
in the area of reconciliation within the Church and in ecumenical
relations, especially with the Jewish people. As if Benedict XVI
were Lucy Ricardo, he wrote a letter to the world’s Catholic bishops
to ’splain why he lifted the excommunication of a schismatic group
whose members did not accept the authority of the Second Vatican
Council and one of whose members—a validly but illicitly consecrated
bishop—had denied the Holocaust on the BBC. The Pope began his
letter:
Some
groups…openly accused the Pope of wanting to turn back the clock to
before the Council: as a result, an avalanche of protests was
unleashed, whose bitterness laid bare wounds deeper than those of
the present moment. I therefore feel obliged to offer you, dear
Brothers, a word of clarification, which ought to help you
understand the concerns which led me and the competent offices of
the Holy See to take this step. In this way I hope to contribute to
peace in the Church.
What had happened is that, in announcing his lifting of the
excommunication imposed by Pope John Paul II, word quickly spread
via the Internet. Not understanding the Pope’s motivation (or,
perhaps not caring one whit what his motivation was, or worse yet,
seeking to contort his true motivation by presenting a lie that, if
repeated enough, is believed by many to be the truth), many in the
secular media promoted their ideological and self-serving
explanations. Of this, Benedict XVI wrote:
I
have been told that consulting the information available on the
internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early
on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we
will have to pay greater attention to that source of news. I was
saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have
had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack
me with open hostility…. At times one gets the impression that our
society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may
be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone
dare to approach them – in this case the Pope – he too loses any
right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without
misgiving or restraint.
Isn’t
that just how we feel when other people, using an entirely
ideological or self-serving standard, judge us guilty of something
we never intended, treat us intolerantly and hatefully, unleashing
the full force of their scorn without misgiving or restraint? Even
if that is true, that isn’t my point today. My point is: Isn’t that
precisely how other people feel when we use an entirely ideological
or self-serving standard, judge them guilty of something they never
intended, treat them intolerantly and hatefully, and unleash the
full force of our scorn without misgiving or restraint? Does that
not provide all the evidence needed to prove we have adopted a
secular attitude?
So, what exactly motivated the Holy Father to lift the
excommunication that caused such a furor among the secular media?
He wrote:
So if
the arduous task of working for faith, hope and love in the world is
presently (and, in various ways, always) the Church’s real priority,
then part of this is also made up of acts of reconciliation, small
and not so small. That the quiet gesture of extending a hand gave
rise to a huge uproar, and thus became exactly the opposite of a
gesture of reconciliation, is a fact which we must accept. But I ask
now: Was it, and is it, truly wrong in this case to meet half-way
the brother who “has something against you” (cf. Matthew 5:23ff.)
and to seek reconciliation? Should not civil society also try
to forestall forms of extremism and to incorporate their eventual
adherents – to the extent possible – in the great currents shaping
social life, and thus avoid their being segregated, with all its
consequences? Can it be completely mistaken to work to break down
obstinacy and narrowness, and to make space for what is positive and
retrievable for the whole?
What
Pope Benedict had attempted to do was to lead the schismatics back
into unity in the Church, a task he called “the supreme and
fundamental priority of the Church and of the Successor of Peter at
the present time.” In light of today’s gospel, “zeal for God’s
house” motivated the Pope. He was working to cleanse the Church of
a schism dividing the body of Christ and to make reconciliation
impossible.
Secularism, as I have defined it, drives zeal for God’s house from
our souls and replaces it with zeal for self-justification. In the
end, our words betray us as we assert why we are so good and why
everyone else is so bad. We pile self-justification upon
self-justification, destroying not only the possibility of
reconciliation with others, perhaps even in our own families, but we
also inhibit if not destroy the possibility for our own spiritual
growth, all the while falsely believing in our spiritual
superiority.
Assessing the situation in which the Pope suddenly found himself, he
noted: “The real problem at this moment of our history is that God
is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the
light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with
increasingly evident destructive effects.”
Lent is the season of the Church year for us to engage in spiritual
housecleaning so that zeal for God’s house motivates everything we
say and do. That requires changing the attitudes that motivate our
behavior, the type of change the Gospel of Mark calls “metanoia,”
the change of mind that gets beyond debating the letter of the
law—that is, who’s right and who’s wrong and why—by immersing
ourselves in the spirit of the law—that is, what authentic love of
God and neighbor requires of each and every one of us.
Let us work to cleanse ourselves of all those attitudes that clutter
up our souls to such a degree we cannot honestly assess what we need
to discard, so that, like Jesus, zeal for God’s house motivates
everything we say and do. Then we will grow spiritually,
having worked to cleanse God’s dwelling place, the Temple of the
Holy Spirit that is our soul.
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