Saturday, August 1, 2020 Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori              (today’s lectionary)
The summer day
With a fine juxtaposition of circumstance, our friend Jan Conrady brought a basket of summer musings yesterday to a deck beside a moving lake, below a bluish cloudy sky, where a few spiritual directors who care very much for each other had our first in-person meeting in months.
Jan gave us time to sit or walk and listen to the warm world around us, watch the flowers, hear the birds, feel the cool water on our feet, taste and smell the morning air … and she gave us a poem, posing the particular against the cosmic. Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.”
A hungry grasshopper eats sugar out of Mary’s hand. When the grasshopper floats away something uncertain awakens in Mary. How shcould she be spending the Rest of her day?
What exactly is Mary getting done? Isn’t there more to do than sit and walk and listen and watch? Martha would be sweeping her dirt floors right now.
Will she make a case, this wandering poet? Jeremiah, speaking up for God before the judges and the jury, does not defend himself.
It was the Lord who sent me, listen to his voice.
I am in your hands, do with me what you think and want.
There is nothing more important to Jeremiah than the words he hears from God. And now his humble, obedient focus on this One Thing carries him through his trial and convinces his captors.
Jeremiah’s words return to me, sitting beside the lake. Perhaps the poet hears them too:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention
How to be idle and blessed
How to stroll through the fields
Which is what I have been doing all day
How easy it is for me to be carried off by anxiety and dread. These are not mere bio-chemical malfunctions, they are marks of a failure to pray, a failure to stroll at ease through the fields of the Lord.
Let not the flood-waters overwhelm me,
Nor the abyss swallow me up
Nor the pit close its mouth over me.
Thanks, Ms. Psalmist, hit me three times over my aching head!
I think of Alphonsus Liguori, an Amazing Italian who suffered great physical pain when he was 71.
I will be 71 this year.
At 71, Alphonsus was afflicted with rheumatic pains which left an incurable bending of his neck. Until it was straightened a little, the pressure of his chin caused a raw wound on his chest. He suffered a final 18 months of “dark night” scruples, fears, temptations against every article of faith and every virtue, interspersed with intervals of light and relief, when ecstasies were frequent.
Well, yes, I would welcome the ecstasies! But at what price?
Still, after all, what do I have to say about it? We all suffer. I choose only how to respond. But Jesus cuts out a deeper furrow when he says to his disciples:
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness
For theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
In his own poorly made kingdom, Herod’s daughter Herodias calls for the head of John the Baptist, and he grants her wish. John, in an instant, is dead, his suffering concluded, his voice silenced. Jesus must have been overwhelmed with grief.
John’s disciples came and took away the corpse
They buried him, and then they went and told Jesus.
What shcould Jesus do? Well, I don’t exactly know, but I can imagine Mary Oliver following in his footsteps as she continues her meadow reverie, even echoing his words:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
           (Jeremiah 26, Psalm 69, Matthew 5, Matthew 14)
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