A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them. This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.(Here is the whole reading, for context.)
I keep coming back to this theme of the one who does things "for pay," for the gain of some good, and not because of a relationship upon which the work, the endeavor one undertakes, is built. I'm trying to ferret out exactly what it is about this that attracts me so.
He works for pay and has no concern for the sheep... These two seem inexorably linked. When you think about it, just about everyone in our culture who is said to work, works for pay. Perhaps the exception is those who own their own business who are working to turn a profit, and who may or may not issue themselves a paycheck. There are of course those who work not for pay, and primarily at-home spouses/parents come to mind here. It was an adjustment for me after marrying, but more so upon welcoming our son into our home, to realize that 5pm did not signal the end of my work day, and that I had no job description, no review board, except for what my relationships created. Moms, fess up: isn't a lot of the pressure we feel born of trying to live up to the expectations of "They" who say this, that, or the other makes a woman good, a mom good, a wife good? Is this approval from "them" the pay we live for? Have we not learned to chuck what "they" say out of concern for the actual relationships that are given to us?
Whatever our "pay" is, it doesn't satisfy for more than a short time. I've talked in other posts about how the pay I've sought is a certain kind of attention from people, a certain way in which people take the place of God to meet some legitimate need I have. That's like trying to fill an infinite hole with very finite dirt. Fr. Roberto, who has lead my local CL community in Advent and Lent retreats the last few times, always stresses that all desires come from God. All of them. We don't always take every desire and run with it in a way that is consonant with our relationship with Christ. But the desire is given to move us toward God. So even desires that I cause to be about "pay" are given to me by God. If I examine these desires and push to the logical limit, I see for me they are about possessing some Beauty. And, as Fr. Giussani says, if we are possessing the Beauty, the Beauty possesses us. So I see the Good, I want the Good, to have it and to be able to share it. That's the desire. But I short-circuit it.
But ok, say I see that Good I desire in someone else. Say it is a bar of gold lodged in the heart of another. (How else can I get to these matters but through tortured analogies?) If I am but a hired man, I care nothing for the sheep, I care nothing for the person (and really, I care nothing for the Good either, but I think I do, or I feel it). I look at the sheep, I look at the person, and I see dollar signs. I see something of value for me, something I think will fill up that infinite hole, and I try to take it. So I do violence to the person, and try to rip that gold bar out of his heart. I end up with nothing. I haven't really known that valuable thing as a Good. It was nice, but not Good. I thought I was being attracted by cash, but really I was being attracted by holiness. And I had no idea of the magnitude of the holiness before which I was standing, so I "thinged" it. My measure was too small. (How many other ways can I say this until it sinks into my own heart?)
If I am the shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, I see that the only way for me to that Good is to embrace the person in whom I find the Good. Our pastor spoke of how sheep need 24/7 care, in good and bad weather. It can be very inconvenient to care for sheep in all their sheepness. It costs us, sometimes dearly. We can't have everything our way -- in fact, we may get very little our way. We lay down our lives. We absolutely must honor the reality of the people in our lives in all their peopleness. We fail each other, of course. But to recognize what those failures really are... therein lies the rub.
How amazing: people are temples of the Holy Spirit. We cannot rip the Holy Spirit out of His temple and keep just Him because we don't care for the style of architecture in which He has chosen to abide, or because we think people are so much "wrapper garbage" that can be thoughtlessly ripped open and tossed aside to get to the real good stuff within. God has chosen His dwelling. He lays down His life to dwell with us. How then can we treat each other, ourselves, as commodities?
3 comments:
Thank you, Marie. I see this at work in so many ways. I think also it's a question of what are our means to the Beauty? Do we think we can "buy" it? To give something "in exchange"? No, we just give ourselves, all the time, and do not concern ourselves with what we may or may not get. What we will possibly get is crucified, as Jesus was, but that's a beautiful gift, right?
Yes, yes... that's a whole 'nother aspect of this. Maybe that's how one responds to the holy when we aren't recognizing it as the holy. We then think we can "buy" it with whatever we have to offer that we think equivalent. Gonna meditate on that one.
Maybe this response of feeling the need to "buy" Beauty is not unlike what I was seeing as the beggar's response in my post about Acts 3. Peter and John provoke him somehow to look at them, and he "paid attention to them, expecting to receive something". We can hardly fault the beggar this. It is a purely human response, and no by no means "wrong" (wouldn't it have been far worse if he had completely shut them out?!). But the small human "cup" the beggar brought could not contain the infinity of power to be found "in the name of Jesus the Nazorean". Even just the "rise up and walk" was just a beginning for him, and the rest of it would (or could potentially) grow over time.
So, maybe the attempt to "buy" Beauty is not, per se, evil. What blocks is not the human attempt, but how powerful we perceive that attempt, how much we are dependent on it and committed to our attempts being what will win the Good. The good that needs to come from the attempt to buy is to see our poverty -- for our righteous acts ARE as filthy rags.
Then again, I've heard the text from Acts used (not inappropriately) to emphasize the need for expectant faith. It is our beggarhood, our poverty, our selves that Christ is after in the exchange He proposes. "I bring you My All; bring me your nothing, your beautiful, alluring nothing...."
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