This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.
There are few things more insipid than “Christianity Lite,” whereby our religion is reduced to weak coffee and glazed donuts in the community center, bingo night, and good feelings about neighbor.
Similarly, there are few things more repulsive than self-righteous, taciturn, sour Christianity that reduces all to a set of rules to follow in order to make the cut–it creates Christians who are at once self-satisfied and superior, and also bitter because deep down they realize that they have missed the happiness they were looking for in Christianity.
Conversely, what a gorgeous picture of Christianity St. Paul paints in the first reading today. He shows as an image of a Spirit plunging deep into the infinite bowels of God where no man can tread and touching and feeling the most impenetrable aspects of the nature of God. Then, approaching the human heart–by contrast so superficial, so distracted, so finite, so petty, that Spirit dives into it, filling it to overflowing with the divine nature. Thus that little human soul is exalted far above and beyond its own natural limitations, and comes to know a joy that it couldn’t have dreamed of. And, it is gifted with an unexpected faculty to assist powerfully in the transformation of other souls as well.
This work of the Holy Spirit is the “pearl of great price” Jesus speaks of in the Gospel (cf. Mt. 13:46). It is to this action that He refers when He says, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Cf. Lk. 17:21).
Nor does a shift to this rich understanding of Christianity require more complicated and esoteric theology. On the contrary, if anything, it requires a simplification of the heart vis-a-vis “Donut Christianity” or Christianity reduced to a rule book.
Still, today’s gospel does remind us that there is a price to pay for this pearl of great price. When we contemplate Jesus casting out demons, we have trouble relating. We admire Him for His divine power, but find little relation to our own lives,
Yet, Jesus teaches us elsewhere in the Gospel that to the extent that a soul is not filled with the Holy Spirit, it is occupied by other spirits (cf. Mt. 12:43-45). Perhaps this is not demonic possession strictly speaking–but to the extent that we are attached to creatures, self, sin, fear, to that extent, real, hellish, living demonic spirits have a stranglehold on us. And extricating the barb that is injecting the venom of sin into us is a costly process indeed, which involves discipline and even some suffering. And militant consistency in daily prayer, where we insistently and recklessly abandon ourselves to God’s love and Providence, holding nothing back.
But it is so worth it–not just to avoid the ruin of ourselves, but to attain that pearl of great price. That pearl of God’s full possession of our hearts is so disproportionate to what we sacrifice, that it is almost unjust. God could have chosen simply to fill our nature with happiness in proportion to that nature’s own limitations. But the joy He gives us surpasses that natural happiness as far as His infinite nature is above our own.
Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask the Lord insistently not to hold back His demands from you, in the face of your weak freedom. Tell Him with all your heart that you give yourself wholly to Him, and beg Him to send His Spirit to push out your sin, fear, and attachments, so that He can take full possession of your heart and fill you with the joy that no tongue can describe.
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