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O'Malley's Best

C'Mon, Get Happy!

Rosalind Russell was an actress with an enviable down-to-earth holiness that many of the truly righteous just couldn't comprehend--and therefore scorned. She was fond of saying, "Life's a banquet. But most poor bastards starve themselves to death!"

And isn't that just what Jesus says in this episode: "Nobody fasts at a banquet"? And isn't it really, really strange that hardly any Catholics in the last 2,000 years have gotten that message? Isn't it true that (even though it's never articulated) the hidden belief is that you're not really a true follower of Christ unless you're actually being crucified?

No one can deny that the crucifix is THE symbol that distills the meaning of Christianity: a statue of a corpse, utterly drained for others. And a genuine Christian does look at that symbol and says, "There is the most perfect human being who ever lived, caught at the moment of his greatest triumph. I want to be like him."

But that's where our reductionism slides past the complex truth. On the cross, Jesus was, indeed, most fully the realization of the Father's will. But let's get some perspective here. People seem to forget Christ's passion lasted only from about eight o'clock on a Thursday evening to three o'clock on a Friday afternoon. That's about 19 hours out of a 33-year life. What's more, Jesus' wily verbal jousts with the Temple officials and his caution about going up to Jerusalem strongly indicate he did not run with open arms toward his redemptive suffering. He eluded it as deftly as he could for as long as he could, just as St. Thomas More later slipped cleverly through the snares laid for him. We have to be ready to face suffering with dignity and with a sense of divinely ordained purpose, just as Jesus ultimately did. That leads to resurrection. But who could worship a God whose plan was that humans endure a life of unbroken agony and confusion as a sadistic test of worthiness to be loved? Isn't life also to gear us up to take on eternal joy?

Arguing positively, too, it boggles the mind that so many otherwise incisive Christians--especially Catholics--seem to miss a quite simple syllogism:

Jesus came to inaugurate the new Kingdom of God. (No Christian would deny that.)

BUT countless times Jesus tried to help us understand that Kingdom by comparing it to a wedding reception. (Surely we can all remember what that feels like.)

ERGO, those who truly believe they have been welcomed into the Kingdom of God must have grins stretching from one ear to another! They're exuberantly open even to people they haven't wanted to talk to for years. And at this banquet, nobody drinks too much, and nobody even thinks to bring up old grudges. In a group like this, they hardly seem important anymore.

If that's what Christianity really, really means, one can imagine a modern-day Diogenes roaming the world with his lantern searching for Christians who actually do manifest that kind of exciting belief.

It's the pinch-faced pharisees and bean-counters and puritans and theorists who've grabbed hold of that enlivening gospel and insisted it's too good to be true, that we have to pay our dues in the coal mines before we can dream of approaching even purgatory. I remember my Mom saying, "Oh, Billy, I pray I can just catch hold of the doorsill of heaven with my fingernails." That form of God to whom well-intentioned puritans introduced me as a boy was not the God Jesus pictured as the pushover father of the prodigal son nor his human Incarnation who dealt so lightheartedly with the adulterous woman and the turncoat Simon Peter.

Doesn't anybody hear Jesus in this passage saying that the time is over for just making-do and grim endurance and getting-by---for cautiously sewing new patches on old clothes or skimping to use last year's wineskins for this year's wine. Come on! Your soul's got to be ready for this new vintage, ready to celebrate because---yes, the Bridegroom did go off and leave us and got himself killed, but the Good News is that he came back again! The Kingdom is now! "And most poor bastards are starving themselves to death!"

Of course you're going to suffer. But if you have a conviction of who you really are, you can chin your way through it with dignity, just as Jesus did. Of course small-minded people (especially those with a bit of petty power) are going to try to humiliate you, misjudge you, degrade you. But if you really, really believe that the Trinity Family---Father, Son, and Holy Spirit---embrace you as one of their own and infuse your soul with their own undying aliveness, which of us could give an instant's thought to the opinions of anyone less than that Infinite Threesome?

Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit