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Reflection for June 25 2006

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Accentuate the positive

Commenting on the decline of faith in modern times, the Scottish poet Kathleen Raine wrote in a poem called "Loss of Memory": The holy words: why did we let them go? / Where are our children, who no longer know / "Our father who art in heaven"? / . . . God has no mother now, / Nor Eve the far hope of her lost garden. / Disinherited from ancestral wisdom / Whose realm protected once, for us / The soundless voice of memory speaks no more / That used to tell, over and over, / The healing words: "Let not your heart be troubled," / Of green pastures and still waters / And the twelve signs of love that never fails.

I feel something of that change in our society, that decline in respect for Christianity occasioned by hypercritical academic and media assaults upon it plus the pathetic performance of believers themselves who fail to exhibit what Kathleen calls the "twelve signs of love that never fails". What are these twelve signs she refers to? They're simply the twelve qualities of love enumerated by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 where it says:

1. Love is patient,
2. Love is kind
3. and envies no one.
4. Love is never boastful,
5. nor conceited,
6. nor rude;
7. never selfish,
8. not quick to take offence.
9. Love keeps no score of wrongs;
10. does not gloat over other men's sins,
11. but delights in the truth.
12. Love never fails; there is no limit to its endurance.

This is the ethic Christ came to infuse into our lives, the forgetfulness of which Kathleen regrets. I mean, the whole of nature, the birds and bees, rivers and seas, the heavenly bodies and the flowers in their season all obey the laws laid down by their Creator. It's only we human beings to whom God has allowed the freedom to say No to his desires, to his maxims from Mt. Sinai and his ultimate commandment: "Love one another as I have loved you." And as a result of our No to this ultimate commandment, will we ever be able to count the lives destroyed or measure the material destruction occasioned by that No? It makes you wonder why God gave us such freedom, our unique ability to say No in the first place. Perhaps, becoming bored with the involuntary obedience of nature, he began to long for a more reciprocal relationship with creation, a deliberate rather than automatic Yes to his affection. But one can only obtain a genuine, personal Yes to one's affection from someone who is also free to say No. Only then can a Yes mean something.

In today's Gospel we have an illustration of humanity's tendency to say No to God. To reverse that tendency, see yourself among these Nazarenes who say No to Christ's advances and then retrieve your No by advancing to that place in the Mass where the celebrant raises Christ up and says, "Through him, with him and in him all honor and glory is yours Almighty Father forever and ever." There's your chance at long last to let out a firm Amen - which in Hebrew simply means Yes, indeed! Hopefully that will propel you henceforth throughout your days (in the words of an old song) to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and never more mess with Mister In-between.

-- Geoff Wood