Homily
for the
24th
Sunday of Ordinary Time
Sept.
15, 2024
Mark 8: 27-35
Villa Maria, Bronx
“He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘Whoever wishes to come after me must … take up her cross, and follow me” (Mark 8: 34).
In the last years of
the last century, a bishop emeritus resided with us at the provincial
house. He left me, at least, a few
memorable quotations. (I’m the only one
who lived with him still at the house.)
One of his sayings was, “In the Middle Ages they practiced fasting and
the discipline. Now we have meetings.”
Few are the
rank-and-file religious who relish meetings.
For most of us, meetings are a penance, a cross, thru which we take a
few paces in the Lord’s footsteps. Perhaps that’s a cross you’re largely spared
these days.
But the cross will find
you anyway. You don’t have to go looking
for a cross to carry alongside or behind Jesus.
Even Jesus preached, “Sufficient for a day is its own evil” (Matt
6:34). Every day brings its
troubles. When those evils, those
troubles, those crosses come, blessed are we if we recognize them and—if we
don’t exactly embrace them lovingly—accept them and do our best to bear them.
There are 2 crosses that
we all have to bear almost daily. One is
physical suffering, pain, or discomfort—from the weather, from something that
breaks down in the house (the a/c or the elevator), from our frail bodies, from
having to get up in the morning earlier than we’d like.
The other is written of
by a certain Fr. Jean du Coeur de Jesus d’Elbée, recorded in Magnificat
a few years ago. “We have a tendency,”
he writes, “to become obsessed by the faults of those around us. . . . Their faults make us suffer, and this
suffering in turn reminds us of them continually.”[1] Unless you’re quite different from me, unless
your community’s a lot different from mine, you’re all irritated by this or
that mannerism of a sister or by some thoughtless word or by some perceived
privilege she gets, etc. Such is human
nature. It wasn’t for nothing that St.
John Berchmans exclaimed, “Mea maxima poenitentia vita communis” [My greatest penance is community life.]
When we were young, the
sisters at school encouraged us to offer up our sufferings—physical or
interrelational—to and with Jesus. Fr.
d’Elbée goes a step further and encourages us to look for the virtues of those
we live with rather than at their faults.
“As much as you can, ascribe good intentions to your neighbor.”[2] The Little Flower urged the same advice: “When the devil ties to put before the eyes
of my soul the faults of this or that sister who is less appealing to me, I
hasten to seek out her virtues, her good desires. I tell myself that if I have seen her fall
one time, she may well have undergone a great many victories that she hides
thru humility….”[3]
If the cross is hard to
bear, we must remember that Jesus walks ahead of us. We’ve chosen to follow him, and we know where
he’s going; we know where he wants to lead us.
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