Sunday, February 23, 2020

My Own Worst Enemy - Homily for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A


Image result for frctured humeral head
          You may have noticed that I’ve been absent from the sanctuary for about a month.  I wasn’t on a world cruise or a 30-day spiritual retreat, I broke my arm. Now, my girls tell me that I need a better story, but the truth is that I fell out a chair reaching for a Bible and shattered the humeral head of my left arm.  All in all, I’m healing well, and the pain has been manageable, so I have no reason to complain—but I will anyway.  For the first three weeks, I was confined to a sling, and I quickly learned how much I use my left arm.  I couldn’t button my pants; shirts became instruments of torture; and possibly the lowest of the lows—my tyrannosaurus rex left arm couldn’t reach my right arm pit to apply deodorant.  Put all three together, and you’ll understand why I stayed away from Mass.  You’re welcome!  Though my limitations were minor in the grand scheme of things, they were frustrating, nonetheless.  From time to time I’d get angry with myself.  I was embarrassed to ask for help all the time.  I felt foolish for having had such a stupid accident, and sometimes, I hated myself for it.  I know that Jesus tells us to love our enemies in the Gospel, but what if I’m my own worst enemy?

          In today’s readings, we’re called to love.  Our first reading from Leviticus tells us to “love our neighbors,” and, then, Jesus ups the ante in our Gospel by commanding us to “love our enemies.”  “This teaching charts a movement from a selective love to a universal love.”[1]  But isn’t loving our neighbors hard enough?  Look around!  Loving our enemies seems nearly impossible.  To that end, much homiletic ink has been spilled, including by me, on what it means to love our enemies and how we should go about doing it.  The answer seems to come down to taking baby steps, which got me thinking about the very first step.  You’ll recall that our passage from Leviticus tells us to “love our neighbors as ourselves.”  This commandment assumes that we love ourselves.  Now, speaking for myself, I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption, at least not all the time.  So, in case you might be like me, let’s focus on that first step—loving ourselves.

           We Catholics understand love as a “theological virtue,” a gift from God infused into our souls that fills us with unconquerable goodwill.  We don’t generate love on our own—it isn’t a chemical reaction or biological urge.  Love comes from God, who is love itself.  “We could not love if we were not first loved by God.”[2]  And that’s where loving ourselves comes into play.  In order to love others, we have to receive God’s love first.  We have to accept the priceless gift of God’s love that we could never earn by our own merits.  We have to let ourselves be loved by God.  Of course, God loves us all the time, but if we don’t let his love in, we have none to give away.  Receiving God’s love is loving ourselves, and as I’ve said before, love is dynamic, not static; it has to move.  So when we open ourselves to receive God’s love, we can’t hold it in.  We have to share it.  Loving our neighbor and loving our enemy, then, begins with loving ourselves.

          But we don’t always love ourselves.  In fact, we’re often our own worst enemies.  We’re ashamed or embarrassed about things we’ve done or have failed to do.  We hold ourselves to untenable standards, and we even blame ourselves for freak accidents, things beyond our control, and not being able to button our pants.  When we treat ourselves this way, we live within the confines of what Bishop Robert Barron calls the pusilla anima—the small soul.[3]  Saint Augustine uses a similar concept to describe ourselves when we sin—incurvatus in se—curved in on oneself.  What does this mean?  When treat ourselves like the enemy, we close ranks, we take a defensive position, and our souls shut down.  In that posture, there’s little room to receive God’s love, and we’re miserable.

          But when we love ourselves, we move from the pusilla anima to the magna anima—the great soul![4]  We open up to receive God’s boundless love, and the Spirit of God dwells within us.  We become what Saint Paul says we are in our second reading: Temples of God (1 Cor. 3:16), and we’re happy.  And you know, loving ourselves isn’t rocket science:

+ We love ourselves when we respect our God-given human dignity, when we take care of ourselves, and when we allow others to be Jesus for us by accepting help when we need it;

+ We love ourselves when we rise above our failures, weaknesses, and suffering and find purpose and meaning in our lives nevertheless; 

+ We love ourselves when we receive God’s compassionate, merciful love in prayer, in the Eucharist, in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and in all of the good works of his Church.

And why shouldn’t we love ourselves?  We’re loved by a God who pardons all our iniquities, heals all our ills, redeems our lives from destruction, and crowns us with kindness and compassion (Ps. 103:3-4), just like our psalmist tells us. Even in our abject failures, our profound weaknesses, and our seemingly endless sufferings, God still loves us, which is reason enough to love ourselves.  Who are we to treat ourselves with contempt when the Almighty God has decided that we are worthy of his love, warts and all?

          You know, I really can’t complain about my injury.  For all of the times I got down on myself, there were many more times to love myself.  For example, throughout this ordeal, my attitude has been really good—I can’t imagine not having a complete recovery.  I also discovered a grit and perseverance in myself that I didn’t know I had—like the time I couldn’t twist open the screw top of a Talenti ice cream container, so I marched that baby down to the basement, clamped it in a vice, and ripped the top off with my good hand.  And last, but not least, I acknowledge the small victories—like when I got out of the sling; when I raised a coffee cup to my lips for the first time; and yes, when I buttoned my pants.  Now I just have to remember to do it!  Thank God for vestments!  God loves us; we need to love ourselves, especially when we’re our own worst enemy.



[1] John Shea, The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers: Year A, On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), 84.
[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (New York: Image, 2012), 76.
[3] Robert Barron, And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 5.
[4] Ibid.

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