30th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

Love God with all your heart, soul and mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.  Quite a project! 

Love is about relationship, connectedness.  Usually it starts off as attraction; it can feel overwhelming.  “I can’t live without you.  You are the answer to all my dreams.”  In fact, I am in love with what I imagine you to be.  I think that our love for God begins that way.  God is the answer to my needs: for a sense of order, for meaning, for inner peace, for security, for warmth and reassurance.  The God who won’t let me down, who might answer my prayers, who will see that the innocent won’t suffer.  The trouble with our human relationships is that in fact you are not what I imagine you to be.  You are yourself, a mystery, out of my control, a person in your own right.

For the love to deepen, I must move beyond attraction to intimacy – to learning who you really are.  I must begin to trust the mystery that is you, that I don’t control and often don’t understand.  And I must begin to reveal the real me to you if the relationship is to be reciprocal.  To stay together we need commitment.  It can be a lifetime project – and not without struggle.  As a mediaeval author described it: All that I am just as I am offered to all that you are, just as you are.  Something similar happens with our movement into God.  I need to lose faith in the God I formerly believed in: We live in a world of tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts, in a world where the innocent are oppressed, terrorists go unchecked, where hearts are broken, prayers don’t get answered and questions remain unsolved.  God is not what I first imagined, indeed hoped.  I can’t understand God.  I feel bewildered at times, let down, angry.

For my relationship to grow, perhaps even to survive, I must discover the God who is – no longer just useful somehow to me, but mystery; who loves, perhaps, (though I no longer feel confident that I quite understand what love is).  We must grow into reality, and relate with genuine intimacy, beyond control, beyond usefulness, to contemplation.  God is already there; I am the one who needs to mature.  This, too, can be a lifetime project – and not without struggle.

There is more.  As a French author described it about sixty years ago: Love is not two people gazing at each other, but rather standing shoulder to shoulder and looking in the same direction.  Beyond intimacy, and the commitment it calls for, lies the possibility of a gradual attuning to each other’s heart and mind.  No longer absorbed in each other, but peacefully confident in each other’s commitment, learning wisdom together, we look outward to our world in our desire and capacity to give life and to nurture, in care, and in a sense of shared responsibility.

The same can happen in our relating to God.  In time our contemplation leads to finding that our hearts begin to beat in time with the heart of God.  We look outward to our world, wanting and able to give life and to nurture, to reconcile, to stand up for justice.  We find that we begin, indeed, to love our neighbour as ourselves, not because we should, but because, carried along in the energy of God’s creating love, we want to.

Loving God with everything, and our neighbour as ourselves, are not two commandments, but two movements of the one divine energy.

We have gathered today to celebrate Eucharist as the Year of the Eucharist comes to a close.  We remember Jesus’ death.  We remember that he was murdered by the guardians of the social order because of his insistent, practical concern, as a faithful Jew, for what the First Reading called the aliens, widows & orphans, and the poor.  He loved them because his heart was attuned to the heart of his Father to whom we all are equally precious.  We celebrate his death as we open ourselves to the same stream of creative love.