Journey's Weekly Homilies

Journey Catholic Community
July 20, 2003
16^th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Homily by Tom Kinzie 

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Ephesians 2:13-18
Mark 6:30-44 

One of the sure signs of depression, and I speak from experience, is the sense of the utter scarcity of things.  The universe seems marked by a closed door.  Wherever one turns it is the same old story, the same dilemmas, the same sense of failure and hopelessness. What had once been a world full of possibility has become a darkened dead end, the door firmly shut, the window closed and the shades pulled down.  It is a horrible place.  I am attuned enough to the signs of this closed, shut down world that I can get scared just thinking I might be experiencing a first symptom.

Flying down to LA last month to visit my brother took me back to a time I felt the world to be thus.  The captain’s breezy voice announced “Hello Ladies and Gentlemen.  We are beginning our descent . . .” and so on.  You can’t fool me.  The very casualness of his voice at 30,000 ft. was enough to get my heart rate elevated.  The liar, I thought, as I looked out my window sure to see a flaming engine, or a wing tearing itself away from the plane.  

Perhaps, it was this tension and anxiety that took me back to the same flight four years earlier.  Then another brother and I were flying down to LA to visit our mother; a visit we already knew would be our last.  From the airport we drove to the hospital to see her.  I realize now that I had spent the previous few years as angry as hell about it all, or more likely, in that inward anger that is depression.  There was a thought, a question that I couldn’t get around, that rode me like a heavy trunk on the back of a poor stevedore.  Why do we live a life so full of so many things, invest ourselves in it, in the myriad ways of love, desire, labor, sorrow only to find on one day that it ends, that it is all over?  I know it sounds like a freshman’s philosophy paper, but it was the one question that I could not get past.  Everywhere I went there the question was, staring at me: Why after all of this, all of life’s beauty and madness does it just end?  Why this then nothing?  It seemed cruel to me then. 

So there we were, three sons gathered around a dying mother.  She was so small, so tiny, as if she were holding on to life by the merest whisper.  We were not connecting with her.  She seemed barely conscious, or so I thought.  One of my brothers asked, “Mom, do you know who is here?  And she answered, “My boys, Dave, Steve, Tom.”  She looked at each one of us as she spoke a name.  Though breathy, weak and faltering, the words came out of her mouth like a shotgun to the heart. 

Where did those words come from?  I have thought deep and hard about that for truly those simple words broke a logjam in me; they broke open a shut-up universe, and a door was opened inside of me.  From that day on I was learning to breathe again.  What I am going to say may seem odd but this is where I am with it now.  I have come to feel that those simple words were first spoken at the beginning of the universe and that they traveled on and on through a trillion moments until that one moment, until they came out of the mouth of an old woman surrounded by her astonished and blessed sons.  I mean that such words of love are spoken by God.  Whenever they come to us they are pure gift and they are meant to break open the heart so that we can live more fully. 

There is a Christian mystical tradition, I don’t know where it comes from or even if it is orthodox.  It doesn’t matter.  Think of it as an image, a symbol that might provide an insight.  This tradition says that when God first spoke God spoke into the uterus of Mary.  Everything that is a birthing of that spoken word.  In the fullness of time we too are born, we too are the spoken words of God.  We are words of love spoken by God.  How hard it often is to believe this. 

We live in a vastly different world than the world Jesus lived in, a vastly different world than the world of those who went after Jesus to that remote and lonely place.  In the chapters preceding this reading Jesus is a healer.  His merest touch could heal.  Demons were thought to be the main cause of illness, the real meaning of illness was demonic possession.  The demons were driven out by the healer/exorcist and people were healed.  His merest touch could heal, so the woman who had bled for years.  We no longer understand illness this way, but still, God knows, the demons of loneliness and alienation are all around us and within us.  There are still far too many who suffer from lack of community, the lack of touch, the lack of human contact and genuine caring.  For good reason our culture has been described as a culture of strangers. 

Directly before this reading there is the report of the killing of John the Baptist.  Our prophets rarely eat locusts and a street preacher like John the Baptist would seem more of an oddity than profound, more likely to be questioned for sanity than to be executed.  Though today’s prophets can still be gunned downed by violence, more likely they will be marginalized by the sheer indifference of a beaurocracy that has lost its heart. 

In this part of the world starvation is rare but there are still hungers that run deep --physical, emotional, and spiritual hungers.  We hunger for love.  We hunger for meaning and purpose.  We hunger for deep connections with each other.  We hunger for a hope that will feed us so that knowing our days will end, we trust they will not end only in regret or a backward glance.  All of those who followed Jesus to a remote and lonely place hungered.  In our journey we too may find ourselves in such a place, a place where we come face to face with our hungers.  In this remote place, we are promised, we will find Jesus and out of the ordinary stuff of the universe he will feed us. 

Those who followed Jesus then were the poor and the boot of the oppressor was never far away.  They were perhaps surprised that the liberation Jesus offered them could be taken inside themselves, that they could feed on it.  It was such a food that it did indeed offer a new life, a life lived in the love of god, a love that was, Jesus kept saying, already healing the possessed, already breaking down the old divisions, the old hierarchies.  Eat on it and be fed, he seemed to be saying.  There is more than enough, he says, and even then more will be left over.  This love you feed on is the power of the God who heals, who feeds, who liberates.  This food is whenever you want it and it is in the midst of you.  There is no scarcity here. 

What is our hunger now?  What is our ache?  What drives us to a remote and lonely place?  Is it the sheer indifference of a world power that does what it pleases despite the cries of millions for peace?  Is this the emptiness we feel, that our voices do not seem to matter? Is it that the vast systems of power go madly on and that even as we seek to change it we know ourselves to be beholden to it at the same time?   Is it that we live in the land of plenty while struggling for world equality?  Is this our hunger, this ambiguity of it all?  Or is it something different, some more personal emptiness that is our hunger?  Is it some not yet healed place from years ago or just yesterday, an ache, a sorrow, a sense that we have not been loved as well as should have been? 

All of this, all of this ‘not-yet-ness’ of life, all of our hope for some new beginning, our longing for justice and peace, all of our hungers we can take with us to that remote place.  Indeed we must go there to encounter the real reasons for our hunger.  Still, we go there to be fed to our hearts’ desiring.  There is a love there that even after we are given all that we need there is still much left over.