24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
September 16, 2023
My Apps
I stand before you this evening as a luddite – that is to say – a person who generally doesn’t get along well with technology. The truth is my I-phone is where apps go to die. Especially those apps that are preceded by the word “my” – for example, “my-Arby’s”; “my-Bank” and yes, there’s even one called “my-Buick”. My discomfort stems not only from my habit of forgetting passwords, but also with the prefix “my” found on so many apps. Even if this is good marketing it is also plays into cultural self-centeredness, the tendency to focus on oneself, to focus on “I, mine, and me”.
This takes many forms and I’ll mention only two. First is what is called the culture of self-invention. My generation was told that if we applied ourselves and developed our talents, we could succeed and prosper in whatever career path we chose. In other words, we could do just about anything we set out to do. Today the message seems to be different. It’s not just that we can do what we want, but also that we can be what we want. It’s as if we could invent our own identity and remake it, almost at will. Nothing in our life is “a given”; our identity is entirely in our own hands. We belong radically and solely to ourselves and to no one else, be it our parents, our loved ones, the wider community, or God. And if we imagine that nothing is given to us, then nothing will likely be received.
A second way our culture promotes an unhealthy focus on the self is isolation. Despite our digital connectedness, we’ve never been more separated. The need to tell everyone on Facebook what one had for dinner might well mean that one had dinner alone, without flesh and blood companionship and camaraderie. The tendency to belong only to oneself and to focus only on oneself has led to what some are calling “an epidemic of loneliness”, a massive mental health crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic but well underway before the pandemic.
Romans 14:7-9
Writing to the Church at Rome nearly 2,000 years ago, St. Paul strikes a contemporary chord when he says, “None of us lives for oneself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord. So then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” We belong to the Lord – all of us and each of us belong to the Lord. And because we belong to the Lord, we also belong to one another as members of Christ’s Body, the Church.
Whether it is the cult of self-invention or the pandemic of self-isolation, what is lacking in our culture today is a sense of belonging. There seems to be a nagging fear that belonging either to the Lord or to one another is an impingement on one’s freedom, dignity, and self-determination. Yet, it’s precisely by belonging to the Lord that we experience true liberation: liberation from the tyranny of self; liberation from sins that mar our dignity; and that liberation which enables us to become the persons that God created us to be.
Ambient Anger and Resentment
Not surprisingly, the culture of self-invention and isolation is an angry culture, a culture in which resentment is fanned and forgiveness is in short supply. We don’t have to dwell on this point, only because it is massively evident. Just think of how polarized our politics has become or how cruel are the comments on social media and in traditional media, or how unforgiving the cancel culture is. And since we all drink from the well of cultural ground-water, we are likely to absorb some of these same tendencies. We may well find in ourselves echoes of the self-centered anger and resentment that are so much a part of today’s cultural and political environment.
Should we not, therefore, take to heart what we heard in the Book of Sirach? “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” When we are wrapped up in ourselves, with our sense of belonging stunted, then we provide a fertile breeding ground for anger and resentment. We keep score, carefully identifying those who have inflicted dignitary harm on us, and when we are alone with our thoughts, we are smoldering inside. Sirach, or Ben Sira as the author is known, urges us to chart a different course: “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice, then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.” And he adds: “Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?”
It is the Lord who brilliantly illustrates this for us in today’s Gospel parable: the servant who is forgiven an enormous debt by his Master is unwilling to forgive a much smaller debt owed to him by a fellow servant. That wicked servant was merciless in spite of the mercy lavished upon him. The parable sets in sharp relief the master’s mercy and the servant’s self-centeredness.(1)
It shows us the peril of exalting our fallen selfishness above God’s goodness. Nothing imperils our freedom, dignity, and worth more than that. Refusing to forgive others after God has forgiven us so much threatens to confine us in a prison where we are tortured by regret and self-recrimination, perhaps eternally. Mercilessness at once damages our psyche and threatens our eternal destiny.
The Antidote
The antidote, the remedy for all forms of self-induced anger and resentment is mercy. In the first place, God’s mercy, which begins with the humble acknowledgement that we are his people, his flock, and each of us his son or daughter. Trusting in God, let us allow the Lord to gaze on us with the eyes of mercy and let us in his grace return that gaze, absorbing the fact that we always experience God’s love in the form of mercy, a love that is patient, kind, generous, and yes, forgiving. And receiving that love, let us reknit our attachment to the Lord, our baptismal birthright of belonging to him and thus belonging to one another in the Church, the People he redeemed, the Church whom Christ created to stand in every culture as the sacrament, the living and effective sign of the reconciliation he won for us by his saving Death and Resurrection.
All around us are the fonts of mercy – the confessional, the altar, ministries of mercy. All around us are daily opportunities to exercise mercy and forgiveness. Never is there a day when we cannot strengthen our relationship with the Lord and our ties of belonging to our families and to our church community. And how better to address the deficits in contemporary culture – not by angry polemics which lead to more of the same – but rather by living differently, by being different for we do indeed belong to the Lord and to another, bound as we are by cords of love and thus the cords of mercy. May our merciful and loving God bless us and keep us always in his love!
[1] This paragraph was drawn from Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Vol. II, pp. 653-654.