Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Luke 14:1, 7-14
In July I took a road trip into Eastern Oregon and Idaho on the way to Spokane to see my dad, and I stayed for a while with the sisters of St. Gertrude in Cottonwood, Idaho.
It’s a beautiful place, rolling wheat fields in front, the Clearwater Mountains in the distance, and behind the monastery, up a hill, a forest of ponderosa pine. The sisters have a deep, ecological spirituality. Recently they commissioned a series of five fabric sculptures depicting the “Passion of the Earth,” the Passion of Christ seen as applying to the planet we live on, from the Big Bang to Eden to our environmental gluttony and lust. I was really impressed.
But what impressed me even more was how the sisters welcomed me, how they gave me a place at their table. The first evening, when I went to the church for Vespers, I found a place set aside for me in the choir, with a book laid out to the right pages--in the choir, not in the congregation, right there, among all the sisters.
The sisters are Benedictine, but they haven’t worn habits for a generation. They were all in print blouses and jeans and sensible shoes. It was like I was surrounded by sixty four moms, some of them with walkers, some of them pulling oxygen carts behind them. During prayer I could hear the little, regular gasps of the oxygen machines.
The sisters eat with their guests, too, no division there either, and at lunch one day I sat across the table from an elderly sister, Sister Barbara. I thought, well, I’ll give her a thrill. I’ll talk to her.
“How long have you been here, Sister,” I asked.
And she replied, with a sly, little smile: “since 1944.”
My God! Since 1944? The more I talked with these women the more impressed I was, not just by their Ph.D.’s and their history of teaching and travel and service, but by their simplicity and their humility.
I don’t want to romanticize the monastic life. It’s the job of the sisters to pray every day and it’s our job to come and stay with them now and then, so we can return to our lives with more energy and focus. That’s all. But that’s everything. To be with those sisters was to touch in to the central teaching of the gospels, the only teaching, really, the call to humility, to surrender, to putting others first. We get that today in the gospel. We get that everyday in the gospel.
For Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, the call to humility is the gospel, not to desire wealth or poverty, fame or obscurity, even life or death, as long as we are close to Christ, as long as we are with him--in fact, if it is the will of God, to want and to choose poverty. This especially rings true to me when I think of poverty in the broadest sense, not just material poverty but poverty of reputation, say, poverty of influence and power.
“I bet you’ve seen a lot of changes in the Church,” I said to Sister Barbara, and again she smiled that little smile. Of course she’s seen a lot a changes in sixty years, a lot of controversy, and she has pretty definite opinions herself. But I got the distinct impression that for her much of what we all fight about is trivial and silly, one way or the other. It’s on the surface. Whatever the headlines, she’s going to get up in the morning and pray. Whatever the latest dogmatic dispute, she’s going to keep on living the life she’s vowed to live.
On the hill behind the monastery, in the forest, there is the cemetery, simple white stones in simple white rows, all these sisters who lived a life of prayer and died unknown.
This is what Sister Barbara finally cares about. This is her goal. Because in the end the women in that cemetery were not unknown. They were deeply known, they were known by God, and they are with him now, they are in union with him now, and this is all that really matters. This is what our hearts most desire.
How free we would be, in our families, in our careers, in the Church, how wonderfully free, if only we believed this, too.
So let me invite you to do something this week.
My mom used to say that the most invisible people in our culture are elderly women. We don’t see them. We don’t value them.
So my invitation to you this week is to seek out an older person, a woman or a man, and to listen. See who this person really is and who this person is calling you to be.
Or just wait. God will send someone, I’m sure, someone you know, or someone on the street, in the pew.
And not just an older woman, but a younger one, too, maybe. A girl.
In the spring, when we went on pilgrimage in Mexico, I was sitting in another monastery church, the Queen of Angels Monastery in Cueunavaca. It was Sunday mass and lots of families had come up the hill to join the Benedictine men. There was a family next to me, with a girl of about 12, with very black hair and dark skin, shy at first, but more and more friendly as the mass went on. Suddenly it hit me how the tables had turned: how this girl I wouldn’t have paid attention to in Corvallis, this girl I wouldn’t have seen, this girl I would have avoided, how suddenly she was the one with the power. She belonged and I didn’t. She knew what was happening and I didn’t. I didn’t know anything.
Then she took my hand, at the Our Father, and we prayed--or she did, since she knew the words. Then she turned and offered me the Sign of Peace, smiling this very sweet and innocent smile, and I thought, what asses we are! What asses!
And how blessed we are. How blessed!
And I thought how power doesn’t matter, and position doesn’t matter, or the color of our skin, or how old we are, or how educated we are, or even if we can speak the language or speak at all. Because this is the table of the Lord. This is the Eucharist, and we are all invited to recline here, we are all equal, we all belong. We all belong to a reality deeper than culture and deeper than words and deeper even than our sinfulness. A reality of love. A love who can free us, if only we will let Him..
