You cannot bring home the frontier

The Pope on frontiers, also from the interview. This is a good gloss on what I've tried to get at earlier in the Pope's thought as it relates to the periphery (which in his earlier thought he seems to refer to as the frontier). [See the tag periphery below for earlier posts on the topic.]

"When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”

And he links the frontier/periphery, again, with the poor: 

“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it. There is a brilliant letter by Father Arrupe to the Centers for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says clearly that one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to the places in which there is poverty. The word insertion is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.

God is a surprise

From the recent big interview with the Pope: 

"God is encountered walking, along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. Discernment is essential."

Your life story

Here are two excerpts from Pope Francis's recent homilies at Casa Santa Marta.

Jonah. John August Swanson.

1. On Jonah and the good Samaritan: "I ask myself and I ask you : Do you let God write your life story or do you want to write it yourselves? And this tells us about docility: are we obedient to the Word of God? 'Yes, I want to be docile!' But you, do you have ability to listen, to hear it? Do you have the ability to find the Word of God in your every day life, or are your ideas what keep you going? Or do you allow yourself to be surprised by what the Lord has to say to you?"
2. On Martha and Mary: "And we ourselves, when we don't pray, what we're doing is closing the door to the Lord. And not praying is this: closing the door to the Lord, so that He can do nothing. On the other hand, prayer, in the face of a problem, a difficult situation, a calamity, is opening the door to the Lord so that He will come. So that He builds things, He knows to arrange things, to reorganize things. This is what praying is: opening the door to the Lord, so that he can do something. But if we close the door, God can do nothing!"

Who is writing our life story? Who is building our life? Am I, or is God?

At the feet of Jesus

The Gospel for today is about Martha and Mary. We are all quite familiar with the story. Martha is serving and preparing for Jesus. She must be quite busy. Mary is at the feet of Jesus, listening to his word. Martha becomes a little irritated, understandably, and asks Jesus that Mary help her. And Jesus replies that only one thing is necessary. Mary has the better part--it will not be taken from her.

The story is often interpreted as the elevation of the contemplative life over the active life. Martha is busy trying to prepare the house for Jesus, perhaps a little too busy. She represents the active life. Mary is sitting with Jesus, simply being with him. She represents the contemplative life. Insofar as the contemplative life is objectively superior to the active life--since the contemplative life more closely approximates our life in heaven--this is a legitimate interpretation of the text.

But even as this interpretation answers one question--namely, the relative ranking of the active and the contemplative life--it raises another: how are we to spend our time between the two lives? After all, no one on earth can live a purely contemplative life (even hermits need to eat and sweep out their huts) nor can anyone live a purely active life, try as we will (since nothing can take from man his desire for the happiness that this world can give; he is always restless for more, a sign of his interiority).

So we come to what I think is the deeper point of the Martha and Mary story: the need for discernment. Again, we are faced with a critical question: how do we decide to spend our time? When do we pray and when do we act? It is a question of immense importance, and confusion on the answer can have real consequences. Let's take the parable that immediately precedes the story about Martha and Mary. It is about the Good Samaritan. Here there is a confusion about how we are to spend our time. A priest walks by a wounded man on the way to the Temple, while a Samaritan stops to help. Perhaps the priest thinks to himself, "I'm off to Temple, and I can pray for that poor wounded man on the way. I've chosen the better part--no time to stop." That would be hypocrisy indeed! In this case, even though the contemplative life is superior to the active life, prayer without action would be a great evil. Pray for the wounded man on the road--good, yes!--but also act: attend to him, bandage his wounds, take him to an inn and provide for him.

So the question is this: how do I discern God's will for me, at this moment? How do I balance the obligations between prayer and action, knowing that prayer is the most necessary thing, but that this world also requires and yearns for our works of love? Here is where we get to the heart of today's Gospel. Action and prayer can both be at the service of God. But when we make an idol of our projects, when we cease acting for God and begin to act for ourselves, then we lose sight of the great treasure of our lives. When we begin to act for ourselves rather than God, we become irritable when things do not go our way, when they do not turn out well. We lose our peace. It is then that we have to return to the Master and prayer, reorienting ourselves to him and his designs--the better part.

What is the better part? It is placing ourselves at the feet of Jesus. This is the critical point: we must always place ourselves at the feet of Jesus, listening to his Word. We can place ourselves at his feet when we act, by humbling ourselves and serving others. Christ is in our family members, friends, and colleagues. We can place ourselves at his feet by serving them. We also serve and glorify God by taking time to literally place ourselves at his feet in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

The contemplative life is superior to the active life. But human life, no matter one's state, is always a mixture of both contemplation and action. It is our task to discern what God's will is for us at any one moment. We can begin by asking our Lord: "How can I place myself at your feet? Let me hear your word, as Mary does, and respond with action, as Martha does. Give me the heart of these saints."