20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 20 August 2023
In his novel, The Great World, the Australian writer, David Malouf talks of ‘the little sacraments of daily existence – “all those unique and repeatable events, . . . movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the beginning.”[1] Malouf is alluding to the flow of life that goes on underneath the façade of life, under all the things that occur through the exercise of our role or our responsibilities.
In some ways, all of us live two lives: the life by which we are known publicly, the life others see; and the life that only we see, the world of our hidden fears and anxieties, our disappointments, and resentments. I am not talking, here, of a double life – a public life and a private life that contradict each other. Rather, that our public self is never our whole self. We know that we carry experiences, memories, hurts, disappointments that are personal to us, and about which others may never know. It is to adapt Malouf’s words, “our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events.”
Often enough this hidden level of our self simply runs without interfering too much on what we do now and in our relationships. However, we also know how it has the potential to become a weeping sore for us, to bleed us dry, to sap the possibility of the present and the future from us. Then we experience an alienation within ourselves between what we most deeply want and our capacity ever to realise this.
As Pope Frances (16 August 2020) would observe, “Each one of us has our own story and it is not always a . . . clean story . . . Many times, it is a difficult story, with a lot of pain, many misfortunes and many sins. What do I do with my story? Do I hide it? No! We must bring it before the Lord, “Lord, if you will it, you can heal me!” This is what the woman in the Gospel account teaches us, this wonderful mother: the courage to bring our own painful story before God.”
The woman in the story brings her experience – difficult, confusing, and as painful as it is – to Jesus, and she does so with persistence. This is her invitation to us. There is a part of us that considers we can only come to God once everything is sorted out, only after we have achieved a certain purity. But this mother suggests to us otherwise. She brings her longing for healing in her family to the Lord. So, too, we bring our longing for healing before Him.
This, of course, raises the question, What is healing? We could be tempted to think that healing is simply a magical disappearance of what afflicts us. And we could come to the Lord expecting that somehow he will effect a kind of surgical excision of what troubles us from our life. However, we know that this ordinarily does not occur.
No, healing in the Gospel is quite a different process, it is much slower, more gentle process. It is about being honest about ourselves. It is about not denying our reality. As another Australian writer, the late Jesuit Peter Steele, would say, “it is about letting it come home truly and deeply how things are, and responding from that situation.” This is about genuinely accepting our truth, “I am wounded.” What Jesus provides us is his encounter with our woundedness. It is an encounter not of dismissal or condemnation but one that responds to our faith, our trust. And then we know that we are not alone, we are not isolated in our hurts and pain. Someone is there with us. And this companionship, this embrace, assures us that we more than simply our past, our mistakes, our pain. It is this, then, that gives us the capacity to listen for the invitation that lays at the heart of our experience and to make those decisions, and to take those steps that we need to go forward in our life – yes, even with our pain, not despite it, but precisely in the midst of it.
The lesson this Canaanite woman gives us is a powerful one. It comes to us, curiously, from someone who is not a disciple of Christ, who is not Jewish even, but who is pagan. This, in itself, teaches us the extraordinary reality of grace. It is not bound by our own expectations or by our rules and regulations. It can emerge anywhere and at any time. It belongs to complete sovereignty of God. But however or whenever it shows itself, we know its truth by the way that it brings us to two fundamental acknowledgements: our own vulnerability on the one hand, and on the other hand, the tenderness of the Lord. It brings us to our own longing for healing, without defence or pretence, and it brings us to the Lord who always works to bring life out of death – yes, even in – and especially in – “our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events.”
[1] David Malouf, The Great World, (Chatto & Windus, 1990), 283-284.
