23rd Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014

Happy Fathers’ Day! Perhaps it is as much “Husbands’ Day” as “Fathers’ Day”. What I have picked up over a lifetime of listening, reading and observing is that the best way fathers and mothers can be good fathers and mothers and most effectively love their children is to clearly prioritise their love for each other. Loving an adult, an equal, is the great school of love – indeed, loving an imperfect, unfinished, adult, especially when you are an imperfect, unfinished, adult yourself. Learning to love is a lifelong project. We change as we learn to love. We begin to see, to think and to behave differently. 

In every other relationship, we instinctively assess others against our sense of ourselves. We try to sum them up, work out how far we will trust them, where they figure in relation to us, to what we think and to what we are doing. Instinctively, we judge them. Then on the basis of that judgment, we calculate how much of ourselves to reveal, how much to share. Usually the judgment we make also determines how much we will like them or dislike them – potential friend or potential threat – whether we are open, or cautious; whether, and how much, we defend, attack or simply not engage. Effectively, the relationship depends on what they are like.

But as we learn to love, things become different. What others are like becomes less important. What they are in themselves, as themselves, becomes more prominent. They can annoy us no-end, yet we continue to see them with love. We can feel deeply angry, yet know that the relationship is safe. Indeed, the more that every feeling reaction can be recognised and expressed appropriately and caringly, even our own feelings of shame, the safer the relationship becomes. We see imperfections as clearly as before, more clearly than before; but they have no impact on the depth of love. Differing, deeply-held convictions present no threat. Judging, keeping the score, tit-for-tat, become irrelevant.

Our vision broadens. It deepens. We see and accept and rejoice in the other as the other is. Interestingly, at the same time we learn to see, accept and rejoice in ourselves as we are. We see them with compassion, knowing that their cry of anger, like our own, masks a cry of pain. The previous “What I see is what ‘I’ see” gives way to “What I see is what in fact is.” The distorting lens of self-absorption gives way to an ever-clearer grasp of reality in all its complexity, paradox and richness. Well, that is the possibility – and there lies happiness. A wonderful thing is that such happiness is not a factor of the other’s changing but of our growing.

Yet, if we want real happiness, there is more. The Seekers used to sing, “We’ll build a world of our own that no one else can share, and we’ll leave all our troubles behind us there. And we know we shall find there’ll be peace of mind when we live in a world of our own.” It is a great tune; but a terribly unsatisfactory message. In today’s Second Reading, Paul suggested instead, Avoid getting into debt – except the debt of loving each other. Not just “in family” but beyond. He quoted the Hebrew Scriptures, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus went further and insisted that we love even our enemies. 

It is easy to agree with his observations when we are in Church. Is it possible? Given the real world as we see it on our TV screens, is it safe even to try? Good News? Bad News? Was Jesus right? Do I want him to be right? Our response may hint at how much we are learning to think differently and to love.

“Happy Fathers Day” to all the fathers among us! And “Happy Lovers Day” to all of us!