The fifth sunday in Ordinary Time
By Evan Underbrink
If
you were to scan literature section of your local library or bookstore, I would
bet that you’d find the happy endings are outnumbered, flanked on all sides.
Upon that library shelf, where all the timeless classics reside, you'll find
the joyful ends of the Divina Commedia and Odyssey. But surrounding
these on all sides there is a Hamlet, Antigone, Media…
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| Job on the dunghill, Gonzalo Carrasco |
This
is really no surprise that the really profound works have some necessary glare
into the dark. As human beings, we do not like to contemplate death or tragedy
much, and so it is right for books and art to take is places we wouldn't
readily go. What benefit is there to the melancholy of death? I mean here true death
and grief, not the fondled desires of morbid minds, wondering how people will
respond to our suicide. That is another kind of brokenness, the product of
which is usually only sad ghosts. No, for most of western humanity, we take
grand and almost comical steps to escape, justify, or satiate our personal
tragedies and grief. Like some wild boar tearing through thick undergrowth, our
flesh defies, races, and is finally subdued by time.
It
is well, then, that great literature turns our minds to stare at that which we
would not naturally look. It scratches the itch in a place where we have never
thought to touch, and we recognize that living life without coming to terms
with our own dusty quality is to inevitably be doomed to nameless, void-filled
fears. Or perhaps even worse, to not come to sober terms with life can lead to
us approaching tragedy without understanding. A person who feels grief without
an understanding of the scope and quality of tragedy has no recourse but
themselves, and very often ends up wandering the twilight between safety and
understanding. Anyone who has experienced that twilight, perhaps someone
wounded searching for healing or at least the reason, or perhaps looking for
God to reveal Himself and answer some questions, can tell you that the twilight
between truth and the dark is a disorienting, terrible place to be.
But
what of the great comedies? Are they lesser, because they do not leave us in
this contemplation? Of course not! And indeed, the very fact that these works
inevitably take us through some tour of hell or dead-man’s land shows that the
great comedies are not without their contemplation of that sad end. If
anything, the comedies are of a higher order of fiction, because they reveal
that the tragedy is not the only end.
Our
spiritual nature, which is a foreign sojourner in the land of time, turns away
from death the same way we might look through a glass door. Since we know
Christ, we clearly see life eternal. For Christ came as a healer; his balms
were not reserved only for soul and mind, but for body and being as well. They
brought the sick to the God-man, and so they were healed. We therefore have no
more fear of death than of any other door into different places. The spiritual
mind turns away from death, simply because death is deprived of its dark robes,
cloaks, and terrible visage.
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| Christ in the Wilderness Moretto da Brescia |
But in today's gospel, after healing St. Simon's mother, Jesus departs from the village, and goes someplace quiet, in the dark
where all the great works glare. For those of us well along in our faith, there
is a call to go out into that dark, and find Christ in the quiet places. That
is where we point the young ones, once they are ready for that long journey.
And in the dark, we who care for community as the Body cares for its members,
must keep our eyes out for the lost ones who wander alone, somewhere between
the dark and light.
It
is no surprise that some are lost between these places of dark and light. For a
strange thing happens in our nature as we approach Christ. The flesh, which had
begun in confident, perceptive strides while in the village of the world, is
now stumbling in deeper and deeper twilight. Meanwhile, that which is divine in
us approaches Christ like waking eyes meet the rising of the sun.
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