21st Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

It seems that even Jesus is on to us to lose weight, to shed the excess. It’s a narrow door we have to negotiate. These vestments I’m wearing may even more be a hindrance than a help!

What’s Jesus talking about? to some extent it’s about the need for self-discipline if we want to be saved. But what does being saved consist of? saved from what? To me, being saved means being saved from everything that inhibits my capacity for deep happiness; and I do believe that true happiness results from being loved, believing it and being freed up to love – myself.

What is it that stops my loving? that stops my believing I’m loved? It’s not others. It’s not others’ fault:  “If only they were different!” (God help me if that’s the case!) But it’s not. The problem is me. I’m full up of myself.  The only way for me to be saved is to empty out myself, to quieten down my infinite wants. We learn our wants our desires, from each other. And, unless we do something, we easily envy each other, and it is so easy to move on from that to feel hostile towards others. When we begin to know ourselves, we begin to recognise the gently simmering hostility that we feel so often towards so many.

How do we thin down? How do we get through the narrow door? I think it begins by recognising our desires for what they are, and learning to sift out the “I wants” from the “I needs”. Then, we need to self-discipline, to say “no” to the spontaneous desires, to say “no” to our own raw self-interest. If we can quieten that down, we can begin to look at each other differently. Some of the spontaneous, so often unrecognised, hostility drains away. Loving others becomes more possible; happiness seems to elude our reach less often.

We need to bring our desires under control. And that is the job of our Ego. But that’s only the start, because, as the self-discipline improves, the Ego starts to inflate. We’re pleased with ourselves. We’re proud of ourselves. But an inflated Ego will also stop us getting through that narrow door. And that is harder to deal with. Perhaps it’s a case of what Jesus said in relation to the rich young man who turned up in the Gospel a few weeks ago: For men it is impossible; but it’s not impossible for God.

How does God do it? By loving us. The catch is: we have to believe it. We have to let God love us unconditionally without in any way deserving it or trying to win God’s love. And that is the last thing the Ego wants to do – to surrender the idea that somehow I can win God’s love. I can’t, and I don’t need to. But surrendering that feeling of somehow being able to control it is scary. It doesn’t feel right. But there’s no other way.

Enter by the narrow door.

To do that, first the Ego needs to bring our desires under control, to prune them, to shed weight, to establish some self-control. But then, the Ego needs somehow to deflate - and it can’t do that itself. Self-control doesn’t work. What’s needed is to surrender control, to surrender control to God, to let God love us totally and unconditionally. To the extent that we do that, we’re on the other side of the door, and our own love expands, and with it our happiness.