12th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Some years ago, I had a friend working as a legal assistant in the refugee camps that sprang up in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. Every morning he travelled over by ferry to the islands on which the camps were situated to spend the day explaining international law to the refugees and trying to work out how their story might relate to their cause.
Along the way, he wrote to me this moving story:
“At Chim A Wan detention centre, Pham van Ai and I interviewed a woman who had been forced into prostitution in Vietnam. In fact, she did this in order to repay a loan she had raised. She had needed the money to bribe officials who were going to put her drunken father in goal for sounding off against the government. When she tried to leave the brothel, the woman who ran it, reported her to the local authorities. A public meeting was convened, and she was ridiculed and humiliated before the whole town. As she told us about these events, she began to break down. She felt disgusted with herself. She felt humiliated, she felt worthless. No one else in the camp knew what she had done, and she was well respected in the hut. Pham van Ai spoke to her at length, trying to assure her of her value and of God’s love. She told us more about what had happened to her. The memory of it all caused her great distress. A couple of weeks later I interviewed her again, this time with Tuan. Again, it was painful for her to talk. We listed a number of options for her with respect to her screening interviews. We tried to assure her that we did not judge her, that she was still immensely valuable and beautiful in God’s eyes. A week later she came to see us a third time. She was clearly much stronger and less weighed down. She thanked us at the end, telling us how much more confident she was, how much stronger she felt. She felt she could endure the contempt of the villagers. We had been speaking to her of her dignity, of the way we saw her, of the love for her father which her actions displayed and of God’s love for her.
“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says to us. It is the constant refrain in the Gospels. And if it be such a constant motif, it is because Jesus knows just how fear works within us. Fear is one of the strongest emotions. It alerts us to what we perceive as a threat, as a danger. It is central to our instinct for survival. It equips us to fight and to defend. Yet, a lifetime of fear or patterns of irrational fear render us defensive. They close us down. They close us in. They can render us inert or they can make us aggressive. Either way they close us off from others. And closed off from others we become the living dead.
Jesus has come that we may have life. And the way to live fully, is to love. To love we must live without defense and with a certain vulnerability, with openness of heart, with receptivity of spirit. Love opens us up; it calls us out of ourselves. This is why our Christian journey, our discipleship of the Lord, is essentially one from fear into love. It is from the inner death that fear occasions into the life that is awakened through love. The journey begins when we can ask ourselves with honesty, “what am I afraid of?” It unfolds at each step I recognize how fear operates in my life and when I can push through that fear into faith, hope and love – the three doorways, as it were, out of the imprisonment of fear.
Henry Thoreau remarked in Walden, most people lead lives of quiet desperation. It was a provocative observation that all of us carry burdens most others will never identify. And one of the greatest burdens we can carry is fear. It can translate into a life of cynicism, of aggression, of rigidity – all of which are the antithesis of the Spirit of God who breathes into us trust, openness and receptivity.
What unlocks the journey for us and each step of it along the way is the acknowledgement of our dignity in God. We are not afraid because nothing evil is ever going to happen to us, but because in the midst of life’s difficulties, which might be immense and painful like those of the Vietnamese woman, we have a dignity, always.
We have value from being known and held by God. This value might be covered up by the messy circumstances of life. And we might only hear of it as a whisper deep, deep within us amidst the darkness of our own struggle. But once having heard it, let us shout it out. Let us shout it out in the face of all that threatens to tell us the opposite, in the face of what that tells us we have no value, we have no dignity. We know those forces: maybe they are represented to us by unemployment, by disability, by failed relationships, by financial difficulties, by emotional struggles. Whatever they might be, as Christians our dignity comes from the truth of ourselves as announced by Jesus of Nazareth. And that truth is that we are cared for, held as important, esteemed eternally.
It is not possible, in fact, to live without fear. It is part of our instinct for survival. Yet, it is possible for us to hear our fear and to choose another way. When Jesus says to us, “Do not be afraid”, he is saying to us “Do not stay trapped in fear. There is something more, something more to which your dignity as a child of God calls you. I am calling you beyond your fear.”
The future belongs to those who with the gift of the Spirit can open their hearts on the confidence of this dignity.
