The Thirteenth Sunday of the Year, A

            The other evening the Young Adults sponsored the first gathering of a group to begin looking at different, well-known Catholic writers.  At my suggestion for our first meeting, we watched the movie Bright Young Things, a film based on the Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, set in England during the heady days before the tragic outbreak of World War II.  The opening scene is one of a party, the first of many parties, with all the expected costumes, dancing, drug-taking, and illicit liaisons.  One thing becomes immediately clear about this set of “beautiful young people,” chased and hounded as they are by tabloid photographers, and that is that they are all but bored out of their minds. 

            And so the pursuit commences, symbolized by fast cars and the high stakes on a horse race, the young people dancing their lives away, spinning ever faster in a sickening merry-go-round, driven by the maddening, gnawing fear that if they slow down, miss a party, fail to be seen with so-and-so, happiness will slip through their grasping, clinging fingers.  But the centrifugal force of their frantic circling, looking for fun, begins to prove too much for them, and they each begin to crash:  the main character sells his interest in a young woman to a rival suitor in order to pay his drink bill; another slips into alcoholism and petty crime for money to keep up appearances; a third chooses wealth – so quickly fading – over the man she really loves; another has to flee the country for offenses against morality; and most tragic of all, a bright young woman finds herself in an insane asylum.  Her set of “friends” still have the decency to visit her in her cell, where they initiate yet another party.  But finally the veil is removed – so shockingly – and it begins to dawn on some of the characters that this – “partying” in an asylum – is nothing but madness.

            Quite a moral tale the film is of somewhat exaggerated consequences that still point to a truth for all of us.  World War II begins, and so does the reckoning.  In the sober and somber light of the terror bombing of English cities, life now takes on a whole new aspect… and reality sets in.  Life.  What, pray tell, is it? is the question that now cuts through the psyches and souls of these party-goers.  And it is, this ever-disturbing question, a blessing that dissipates all the vain distractions.  The threat of hardship and perhaps even imminent death clears the fog off the looking glass, and some begin to see themselves as they really are and that they’ve been spinning out of control, right off the true road to happiness.

            What is that true road?  And where does it lead?  We get a hint of it in today’s first reading, where we find a wise lady of influence welcoming the prophet Elisha into her home, not to inaugurate a party, another dance of distraction, but because he is a prophet, the bearer of the word of God.  Did our Lord not say to His Apostles – the founding prophets of His Church – in the Gospel, “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.  Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward”?  And what is a “prophet’s reward?”  The answer, again, is in the first reading:  Elisha, the man of God, received by the noble lady into the care of her home, promises her – she who is barren – that “this time next year you will be fondling a baby son.” 

            The prophet’s reward then is life, life for those who hear the word of God and welcome it into their hearts and homes; life for those who receive the One, God, whom Christ came to bring us; life for those who receive Him who is Life, Christ; life for those who receive the message of the ones whom Christ commissioned to preach the Gospel throughout the world – the voice of His Church echoing His own voice down through the corridors of time. 

            How one actually welcomes and receives this voice, this message of life, our Lord explains in today’s Gospel, in words that at first may seem so very obscure, because they are paradoxical, paradoxical because they get down to the very basic thing about our time on this earth:  “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  For you see, dear people, the life that you have has been given to you; and we have one major project in the Christian life, and that is to give that life – pure gift – back to God.  “Finding” one’s life points to the feverish, and ultimately vain striving of the “bright young things,” most of whom lost everything that could be called real life.  “Losing” one’s life for the sake of Christ means giving your life over to Him, welcoming His message, kept in His Church, of life and hope… and living it, even if it does, at times, seem like death.  It seems like death, because it really is:  the saying “no” to the tinsel substitutes heaped up before us in the spinning circle, the entrancing merry-go-round of self-seeking. 

            The “bright young things” were not so “bright” after all.  Nor did they remain young, though they seemed to think – as so many do these days – that everything will just keep on going as it is (the dance never stopping, but it does, sometimes in the psyche ward); time passes on, heading somewhere, from earth to heaven (one hopes).  Neither were they mere “things,” but human beings, made in the image of God, able to hear the word of God, and able, therefore, to know their proper end and goal and how to get there.  But first they had to get off the spinning wheel of going nowhere but around in circles, the vicious cycle of vainly trying to find life without giving one’s life to God.  “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”