The Amazing Compassion of God

The parables of Jesus are a never-ending trove of wisdom and grace. No matter how many times I proclaim and preach Jesus' incredible stories, I always come away with something new, something deep, and something to challenge the narrow confines of my spiritual and pastoral life. Yesterday was no different.

It was the parable of the Good Samaritan. The ancient hatred between Jews and Samaritans is a familiar theme. The reasons for it are also familiar: the Great Exile that took the Jews into foreign slavery and left a remnant (Samaritans) to eke out a horrible existence without the Temple, without the priesthood, without familiar rituals and under horrible economic and social conditions. To their mind, they did the best they could -- developing new prayer forms, marrying and building their family lives, holding the memory of Yahweh against tremendous odds. They expected respect and gratitude when the exiled returned. Instead, they got scorn and derision. Thus began the ancient rivalry that is the subtext of this parable.

In a world divided between the clean and unclean, there was no need for the Samaritan to reach into the ditch to help the Jew in peril. The inherited rules of compassion didn't apply to religious enemies. Apparently they didn't apply either to the priest and Levite, either.

But, the Samaritan feels mercy in his heart, a mercy that will transform him. Having "done" mercy once to a sworn enemy, he can never act afterwards with the same old justification, the same old denial, the same old enmity. This one act of compassion will transform how he relates. It will suspend the world of the clean and the unclean forever. And this is Jesus' point.

Mercy is the new rule of the covenant He came to bring. Inclusion is the new norm of catholicity that He came to establish. All other justifications for inaction and exclusion are degraded.

Behind this parable stands a truth that explodes every theory of passivity. God never passes by a ditch of human suffering. God never walks to the opposite side of the road. The death of Jesus reveals the stunning truth of God's kenotic love. He enters the ditch of human misery. The Creed says it, "he descended into hell." Thus, the power and range of Jesus' amazing love.

The parable rocks with meaning time after time, after time.

Francis - Naked without Protection

 Here's the homily delivered at the Feast of St. Francis Celebration at St. Bonaventure University

Every Franciscan has their favorite image, their favorite story, from the life of Francis. Mine comes from the afternoon when, at the age of 25, he is dragged into the village square to confront his father. His father is enraged, sick and tired of his son selling off the family business, giving away his hard earned money to the scum of the earth. He wants his money back. And, Francis is sick and tired of being the poster child for his father’s fashion business, strutting the streets of Assisi like they were the ravenous runways of France. Most of all, he is tired of a culture madly obsessed by greed and violence. Having gone to war, he has seen his friends butchered and left on the bloody floor of the Umbrian Valley.

As the world’s first Millennial, he wants out. He wants more, more than Daddy can pay for and more than his hometown can provide. And so, he strips. In a profound gesture of aspiration, he takes off all his clothes, throws away every trace of fashion, and stands naked before the world, naked with nothing now but the earth and God. He is naked before the naked God.

Francis is going for broke. He wants an intimacy deeper than the hook up culture of his day. He wants a truth beyond the deadly vendettas and polarizing polemics of his times.  All his life, he has played the games and followed the rules of polite snobbery that kept everything and everyone at a safe but unsatisfying distance. He doesn’t want to use women anymore. He doesn’t want to play a religious paddy-cake with God anymore. He wants to live his life, not act out someone else’s dream.

And so, he stands– naked to the world and naked before God. He is stripping not to let go of the world, but to receive it. His poverty is not to experience the scarcity of life, the mere crumbs of existence, but to open himself fully to the abundance of life.

He is standing naked before God and daring God to be absolutely and totally naked before him. He wants God and He dares God to empty God’s self in all God’s fullness into him. Francis becomes empty to receive the fullness of God.

Francis is absolutely going for broke here, because there was no model for what he was doing. Every other saint who had gone naked before him had used protection – monasteries, convents, rules and constitutions, dowries and the precaution that comes from being revered as clergy. They had experienced God but always with a filter, always with a safety net in case something went wrong. Francis wanted none of that. He wanted intensity, and not Nietzsche’s later cheap form of it. He was naked, without protection, before the world, before the sun and moon and stars. Naked before the naked mysteries of creation and God, going for broke.

Francis wanted to know what life felt like without interference. He wanted to know what joy and suffering were like without defenses, existence without the hidden agenda and false premises of other people’s scripts. He wanted life in its raw and naked form, without protection. He would go into the world now without shelter and defense, because he felt safe with God. He had come to know what even bishops and priests had forgotten—that God was good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone.

Brothers and sisters, college is one of those very rare moments in life when we can go for broke. Four years to really stand vulnerable before the mysteries and questions of life.

Let’s not be naïve. We all come here with baggage. We are all the product of our family’s hopes, our culture’s agenda, and our economy’s greed. Business and marketing majors know this. By the time children are three, they can already identify 100 brand logos. Psychology majors know this. By the time children are four, they already feel stress to identify with a particular product. We are programmed to make someone else’s hopes become real and make someone else’s fortunes go higher.

But, college is that absolutely unique, once in a life-time opportunity to stand “exposed” not just before the world, but also before the mystery of God and answer Francis’ two questions:

Who are you, Lord, and who am I?

This university is your time to break through the half-baked theories of the good life that Kim Kardasian and her tribe of clowns and entertainers peddles. It’s our time to question, to muse, to ponder, and to crack open and test every promise of hope and recipe for happiness.

We’ve got to go for broke, whether we’re faculty, students, religious, and alumni.  If we are going to be true to our Franciscan roots, if we are going to earn our title as this country’s first (and best) Franciscan university, we – faculty and students—have got to go for broke.

Students, we are not here to make you cogs in the wheels of someone else’s greed and violence. We are not here to make you fit into a world that can’t make you happy and can’t satisfy your hopes.

We are here to invite you to be brokers for peace, lovers of truth, brothers and sisters to the poor and suffering, to find a love that lasts and a happiness that fulfills.

We want you in the marketplace not just to make money, but to make room for the down and out. We want you in the public square not to peddle some cheap polemic of polarization but to promote justice and the promise of a sustainable planet, God’s blessed creation.

And so, a young man stands naked in the village square and looks around at us tonight. And he tempts us with the promise of a love that can fill the infinity of the heart with a peace that passes all understanding, if we stand naked before the naked God, who is good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone, now and forever. Amen.

What is the Good Life?

The French philosopher, Luc Ferry, in his book, What is the Good Life? (2005), asks whether it is still possible to speak of meaning, value, ethics, happiness and beatitude, in a "disenchanted" world once and for all stripped of divinity. Is it possible to ponder and pursue a meaningful life in a deconstructed world stripped of every trace of divinity, reducible only to technology, finitude, brokenness and death? Using Nietzche as his guide, he is trying to trace a new secular soteriology, in the "intensity" of what he calls the "eternal recurrence" of the instants, the here and now and never the "beyond."

I can't help but think that Ferry is constructing a new stoicism, an amor fati of the present that demands a heroic that posits (imposes artificial) meaning on the chaotic fragments that deconstruction has hammered out for us. He sees or imposes a cosmological order on the universe without a surviving Logos to stabilize or secure anything in place. I am not yet convinced that he has succeeded.

But, give Ferry his due, modern philosophy has left young people today without salvation and without meaning. For them, every moment is an eternity of their own competing interests, ultimately destined to disappoint because everything is unhinged from any mooring whatsoever. Ferry sees the disaster in this and wants to rally philosophy to its ancient task of "salvation" by other means.

Modern education has to confront the question that Ferry poses -- is there such a thing as a "good life" in a deconstructed world? And what is the "good life" that we are proposing to students? One of the threats of modern education is that we simply ignore the question and give our students only the tools to make a living, have a career, and ply their trade in the marketplace. We introduce them to technology but leave the deeper questions of meaning, hope, love and life to chance. It's hard for a Catholic university to compete with this prevailing allure of avoidance, when the forces of consumerism are so strong. But, we do have an alternative.

The Franciscan imagination posits an alternative narrative of what is the good life. Like Nietzche, it involves a stripping, a sort of deconstruction, but not to scarcity or emptiness and not to Nietzche's limited version of the "intense" life of disconnected "instants." We posit a stripping to experience abundance. This is the significance of St. Francis' initial gesture before his father. He is stripping not to "let go" as if to disencumber himself of the baggage of the universe and arrive at a purity of solitude. Just the opposite.

Francis is stripping for the sake of abundance. He goes naked to experience the nakedness of God, the raw power of transcendence, the immediacy of creation and the divine without any artificiality or interference. Francis goes naked without protection to gamble an experience of the divine that has been hidden and obscured in layer upon layer of mediations.

Our task at St. Bonaventure University, it seems to me, is to pose and provide the Franciscan imagination as a progressive, positive and optimistic alternative to the derisory secular imagination that has captured the marketplace today.

What Ferry says of Nietzche could apply to Francis, "He (Nietzche) seems to say that a successful life and a successful death are one and the same; we cannot live well unless we have vanquished all fear, and the way to attain that goal is to work on our lives, to render them so wise and so untouched by folly that we succeed in 'dying as little as possible.' In short, in order to live well one must be ready to die well, with no fears or regrets, and in order to die well one must have lived in such a way that only an infinitely small and inessential part of the self disappears."  Maybe one of the great differences between Francis and Nietzche may be in N's exorcism of folly. Francis did not seem to think that folly could or should be so easily dismissed.

The Feast of St Francis

Every Franciscan has a favorite image or story from the life of Francis. For me, it starts at the beginning, on the day that Francis is dragged before his father in the village square. His father is tired of his son giving away his hard earned money to the scum of the earth. He wants his money back. And Francis, fresh from his traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war, is tired of being the poster child of his father's fashion business. He is disgusted by a culture consumed by greed and violence. He wants out. He wants more.

And so, he strips naked, giving up once and for all the world of fashion. He stands naked before the world and before God. He stands naked to experience the raw power of the world, the deep intensity of relationship without filters, without impediments. He stands naked before the world and before God and he demands that God go naked before him. He wants the fullness of God without interference.

It is an incredible gamble, the gamble of a lifetime, the gamble of a generation.