1st Sunday of Lent A - Homily 1

Homily 1 – 2005 

White ants have got into the flooring in the presbytery at Nhill.  We didn’t know they are there until they had gone.  Remember the rabbit drives of the forties – they hardly made a mark on the rabbit population.  Myxomatosis came on the scene, but they eventually managed to adapt to that.  Then came the calici virus, and I believe they have developed immunity even to that.  In the old days when domestic cats weren’t seen to, we had a female cat.  Every so often, when she was in season, we would have the nightly chorus of all the local tom-cats courting her.  All dad’s efforts to put them off rarely succeeded.  The kittens kept coming.  What is all this about?

There are three basic instincts hard-wired into God’s animal kingdom: the instinct to stay alive, to find food and drink; the instinct to protect life, to defend life; and the instinct to continue the species.  We humans, who derive from that animal world, share the same instincts.  But in human persons the instincts develop and expand: our need for food and shelter becomes the desire for comfort, convenience, variety and choice, wealth; our need for security becomes the desire for independence, control and power; and our need for a partner becomes the desire for acceptance, prestige and honour in the wider community.

However, there a negative reaction in us that comes from somewhere: some would say it is the result of original sin that infects the whole race.  We tend to mistake our desires for needs.  I desire a mobile phone, but I don’t need it.  It may be a necessary part of some other life-style I could have chosen, but for me it is not a real need.  There is no harm in having desires: for a new car, a more up to date computer, a bigger house, designer clothes, or whatever.  The danger is confusing desires for needs, and therefore making an absolute of what is really only a priority I have freely chosen.  

But we are more than animals.  We have what we call an inner spirit, and because of this spirit, our animal needs for life, security and survival have their spiritual counterparts: our need for life becomes a need for integrity, for moral righteousness, and a realisation that our life is to be lived not simply this side of the grave but beyond it as well; our need for security is coloured by our capacity to recognise our basic dependence on God; and society’s need for children matures into the recognition of a deeper need to love, and our ability to love unconditionally, to forgive, and to respond to violence non-violently (as Jesus has shown us).

As there is a negative tendency in us to equate desires with needs, so too there is another: to ignore our spiritual nature, and consequently to subordinate our genuine spiritual needs to our animal needs: to compromise integrity or  principle for comfort or popularity; to be driven by a need to control rather than learn to trust God or to relate in intimacy; to put pleasure before fidelity, hurt before forgiveness

The two drives are so powerful, and yet so deceptive, so difficult to be in touch with.  Their power lies not simply in our own unconscious, but is bound up, too, with the power of culture.  They are so destructive and so deceptive, that people right through the ages have wondered if there is some intelligent, powerful and malevolent person behind them - a devil? There is no doubt that we all feel it.  The authors of the Genesis story that we read today captured it so well in their story of Adam and Eve.  Jesus felt it, as Matthew described so well in his story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness.  Most of us do not encounter temptation put into words for us by a serpent, or visible devil. Perhaps if a devil did appear we would at least see it for what it is: on the other hand we might be terrified out of our wits and lose our will to resist.

The more normal response that we need to make to the continuous temptations that face us is not all that mysterious, even if it is not always that common: We need to learn to recognise our drives: to be able to discern desire from need (and to wake up to our capacity to fool ourselves), and then to sort out our priorities... To do this, we need to learn wisdom; and to learn wisdom we need space,  time to pray.  It also helps enormously to have an astute person, an experienced guru, who can help us to see ourselves from the inside.

Mary allowed life to touch her, but she drew her experiences into her heart, and pondered them.  Her guru was the wisdom of her Hebrew tradition.