21st Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 August 2022
All of us want the best that is possible. However, this can easily insinuate itself through all of our life to make for unrealistic expectations. In our relationships we can easily be led into thinking about how we might achieve the best partner, or the best marriage, or the best relationship. We can even subtly begin to look for the perfect partner, the perfect family, the perfect friendship, the perfect parish, the perfect government – and become very disappointed when we don’t think we have found it. Of course, what we do find is always someone that is imperfect and limited. Every one of us is limited. Our partners are limited, are parents are limited, our children are limited, and our governments are limited.
All of us are flawed. It is not the absence of limitations in each other that makes a relationship work but the way in which these limitations enable each of us to grow that makes the difference. As Pope Francis reminded us in his letter on families, “We encounter problems whenever we think that relationships of people ought to be perfect, or when we put ourselves at the centre and expect things to turn out our way.”[1] Particularly, in our relationship’s limitation is not a deficit but the very means by which we learn the true nature of love. Only when we truly and deeply accept the reality of our own and each other’s limitations – rather than just our giftedness – do we truly begin to grow in our relationships.
Faith, itself, is a relationship. As with every other relationship, it, too, learns along the way that the acceptance of limitation is a key to its growth and to its vitality. Part of this learning comes in the way we accept the Church itself – a motley group who, at best, stumble and stutter along, never quite getting it right. If we applied the logic of ‘the perfect’ to ourselves as Church, then we would certainly despair because so often we are confronted with the stark reality of ours and each other’s limitations.
In fact, we could go further and say that ‘the perfect parish’, ‘the perfect Church’, is never something for which to even aim. Our aims should be about something different than what the notion of perfection will admit. In talking about the person who demands a perfect Church for example, the German writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote,
“The person who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realised by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own laws, and judge the community and God himself accordingly. They act as if they are the creator of the community. When things do not go their way, they call the effort a failure. When their ideal picture is destroyed, they call the effort a failure.” And then he goes onto say, rather “it is the very hour of disillusionment with each other that becomes so incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds but only the one Word and Deed which really binds us together. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian community.”[2]
In other words, in our life together as Christians we are not to seek a perfect vision; rather we are to enter the paradox of both limitation and possibility, never one without the other. The acceptance of the presence of this paradox, not as a deficit to be overcome but a means by which we learn the true nature of both ourselves and of God, is the narrow gate about which Jesus speaks in the today’s gospel. We cannot, as it were, glory in Christian principles and ideals unless we are first prepared to accept the confronting reality of this paradox and to enter it, often confusing, ambiguous, and messy as it can be. But then there is never any new life, as our mothers can testify, without a great deal of uncertainty and confusion. We can’t have the possibilities without the limitations. This is true of our relationships generally it is also true of our life together as Christian disciples.
Some years ago, a famous Scripture scholar, Walter Burghardt put it this way in a homily he gave at a baptism. He said to the woman, Sonia Maria
“Sonia Maria, before we welcome your through symbol and ritual into this paradoxical people, this community of contradictions, let me make an uncommonly honest confession. In the course of more than half a century, I have seen more Catholic corruption than most Catholics read of. I have tasted it. I have been reasonably corrupt myself. And yet, I take joy in this Church, this living, sinning people of God; I love it with a crucifying passion. Why? In spite of all the Catholic hate, I experience here a community of love. For all the institutional idiocy, I find here a tradition of reason. For all the individual repression, I breathe here an air of freedom. In an age so inhuman, I touch here tears of compassion. In a world so grim and humourless, I share here rich joy and earthly laughter. In the midst of death, I hear an incomparable stress on life here. For all this apparent absence of God, I sense here the presence of Christ. I pray, Sonia Maria, that your life within this community, your experience of a strange God and a still stranger people, will rival mine.”
This is the paradox which our life of faith presents as a great but indispensable mystery to us – the paradox of the narrow gate about which Jesus speaks. We can’t have the idealism without its opposite. Or as an old outback Queensland shearer once said – and I think it is a great parable for all our relationships including our faith – “anything perfect is never beautiful.”
[1] Amoris Laetitia, n.92.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
