30th Sunday of the Year, A --“First Things First”

 

            If you have ever read any of the novels of Walker Percy, the famous writer, a Southerner and Catholic convert, you will be familiar with some of his eccentric and disoriented characters, who, nevertheless, seem to play the role of  prophets.  One of his most unforgettable characters was a young woman sent to a psychiatric hospital because she just didn’t seem to be able to come to terms with the modern world.  During group therapy she would insist on sitting underneath the table, because, as she said, peoples’ knees are much more honest than their faces.  And so it is with another of Percy’s prophetic characters, the bemused Father Smith in Thanatos Syndrome, Percy’s last novel.  In one memorable scene, the “crazy” Father Smith interrupts the processional at Mass to turn and address the congregation (made up largely of doctors and psychiatrists engaged in euthanasia and abortion).  He speaks about seeing on television a documentary on the work of this hospital.  And there Father Smith stands.  He has forgotten to put on his vestments, but there he stands in the aisle of the church, chalice and paten in hand:

 

“I hope you know what you are doing here,” Father Smith begins.  “The fellows at the hospital know what they were doing.” 

“True, they were getting rid of people, but they were people nobody wanted to bother with.”

“Old, young. Born, unborn.”

“But they, the doctors, were good fellows and they had their reasons.

“The reasons were quite plausible.

“I observed some of you.

“But do you know what you are doing?

“I observe a benevolent feeling here.

“There is also tenderness.

“At the bedside of some children this morning I observed you shed tears.  On television.

“Do you know where tenderness leads?”

            “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”

 

            This is hard, of course, for us to imagine:  tenderness, benevolent feelings, weeping with sympathy, all leading to the gas chambers?  But we don’t have to imagine it; we’ve seen it happen over and over again.  For example, compassion – with tears and expressions of “great sorrow” – is appealed to, in our own time, to defend something as extreme, so blatantly wrong, as partial-birth abortion.  If human “compassion” drives us to accept as okay or commit such a crime as this, or leads us to starve and dehydrate people to death, or overdose them on one of our “merciful” drugs, or scald or dissect an unborn child to death – then surely this so-called  “compassion” is wayward.  Reason itself, if people would learn to listen to it, cries out against such horrors, and yet how often we hear defenses of abortion and euthanasia couched in the terms of pity, compassion, justice, etc.  This shouldn’t surprise us really, for the great tyrannies of this past century were erected in the name of equality and justice.  Murder and torture of neighbor have been committed for what is described as the good of the neighborhood.  Racism is defended by farcical appeals to nature and its laws.  And we could go on and on.

            What Percy is getting at in this novel is that insidiousness of evil against one’s neighbor that would defend itself under the guise of tenderness and sweet tears.  Perhaps many a person these days falls for this more or less unconscious of wrong.  Thus the low state of our reflective life; thus the blinding power of evil cloaked as a human good; thus the reminder that Lucifer parades around as an “angel of light.”  But how is it that the natural human feelings of pity and compassion – good enough in themselves – could lead to something as unspeakably horrible as the gas chamber, to murder? 

            Today’s gospel holds the key to the answer to that question.  And the answer is in the fundamental nature of the first commandment.  Without this commandment, there is no foundation for the second commandment, the love of neighbor.  That is, without the love of God, there is no pure air for natural, human love to breathe.  There is no corrective to potentially wayward human feelings.  Natural human affection and care for neighbor – again, good in itself – without divine love will eventually wither and go astray.  It will begin, somewhere along the line, to defend the indefensible.  And even on those rare occasions – less and less often in our times – when a human love, without divine charity, seems to survive, still, it will never be what it should be, what God intended it to be (that source of joy that only love brings) without the divine assistance of God’s love in us.

            No, our loves – our affections, romantic attachments between man and woman, our friendships – must be taken up into the divine love, baptized as it were, renewed and purified.  Then our loves, and they are ours, will be avenues of that divine love that loves without condition, freely, constantly, fully, a love whose ultimate expression took on flesh and dwelt among us, bore our sins and sorrows in death, and rose again to bring us to the Father’s love.

            The two commandments in today’s Gospel are certainly not separable, but they are to be distinguished:  the first enables and enlivens the second.  The first is the greatest and the second is like unto it.  Yet there is no sense in talking about loving God, as St. John tells us, whom we cannot see when we do not love (and on occasion do not even treat with common politeness) our neighbor whom we can see.  And we cannot really do and be for our neighbor what we should without the love of God in us.

            It is ironic that even though these days we hear so much about human dignity, human rights, and love of neighbor, tolerance – it is this past century, the 20th century now thankfully over, that will go down in history as by far the bloodiest and cruelest of all so far.  And at the same time we seem to hear less and less about the first commandment, even though the fulfillment of it is the very purpose of our existence:  to know and love God our Creator.  But still the two commandments go together: neglect of God bears ill fruit in the mistreatment of neighbor. 

            So let us listen to our Lord’s words again, as if for the first time, not with our ears only or even merely with the intellect, but with our whole, attentive person:  Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.”  Then the foreigner, the immigrant, the orphan, the widow, the old and infirm, the poor and disadvantaged and the unborn will be safe with us.  For we will be sharing in the very love of God, who is merciful and full of compassion. . .toward us and our neighbors.  And may we be also by God’s grace.  Amen.