And There Was Rest - Homily for the 14th Sunday in OT (2020)

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.

Recently, the Lord blessed me with some time away in the remote mountains of Western Colorado. There, nestled among the sublime, snow-capped peaks and a valley of pine trees, He gave me rest along a small, snow-fed stream with my small orange tent beside it. Each afternoon, typically after a morning hike, I would sit beside the clear waters of the stream and pray, meditating as the cool waters poured and bubbled past. I had my book of prayers with me and, during one of those afternoons, I reflected upon the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa.

Here are the words I reflected upon: “Jesus is like a pure, untainted stream. If you draw from him the thoughts in your mind and the inclinations of your heart, you will show a likeness to Christ, your source and origin, as the gleaming water in a jar resembles the flowing water from which it was obtained” (Office of Readings, Tuesday, OT 12).

In other words, the clarity which Jesus brings will dispel the murky waters in which we often live. Are you troubled or confused by these days? Come to the Lord, come to Him and rest. And in that rest, reach down into the stream of His holiness and draw the clear and cool water of His holiness, His Wisdom, His Charity. The jar which is your soul, murky by the mud and fog of the world, will be made clear again. “Gleaming,” radiant, bright—says St. Gregory. You will be able to see and find joy again.

And so Jesus says, “Come to me.” “Come to me and I will give you rest.”

To rest with Jesus is not a luxury, but a necessity. So necessary that He even commands it: rest today, Sunday; it is the Day of Rest. Else you will become like machines: hardened, stressed, broken, discarded. You are made to be refreshed. I want you to have joy. So come to me, come to me and rest. Put aside the worries of the world and its news cycle. It will be there tomorrow; those things will not change in one day. Do not worry about tomorrow. Rest in me today.

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I have found that when I rest on Sunday and when I take time in nature or on a retreat—and all are necessary and not luxuries—when I rest with Jesus, I receive such a greater perspective and a greater clarity about who I am, about who Jesus is, and what He wants me to do and say in this world.

May I give you just one point of clarity that I received while I sat and prayed along the stream?

Here it is. Topics of race, religion, and politics are oftentimes perceived as very murky. For the Catholic, we take seriously the example of Jesus when He says, “You who are without sin, cast the first stone” and “Why do you worry about the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not address the wooden beam in your own?” I reference these particular words of Our Lord because, at their heart, Jesus teaches that a person is not defined by their worst action. Rather, they are defined by their final action. Saint Dismas—you know him as the one who was crucified next to Jesus-- was a criminal, a thief, a revolutionary, and (it was believed) a murderer. But he was not judged by Jesus before his death. Indeed, at the very hour of his death, Dismas was given a chance for repentance. And when Dismas repented, he was transformed from being one of the worst sinners into one of the greatest saints. “Today,” said our Lord to Dismas, “you will be with me in paradise.”

Jesus’ prohibition for us to condemn our neighbor and instead to address our own need for conversion was done not simply because He wants us to be kind to our neighbor. Jesus additionally wants us to believe in the conversion of our neighbor—to have hope for his or her salvation.

This was the point of clarity I had: In our culture, would Dismas truly be afforded the opportunity and hope of conversion—or would he simply be written off?

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There is a very fatal error being made in some of our attempts to make sense of the various opinions, rebellions, and riots of our day. The fatal error is to have an attitude that judges, defines, and then discards a person or a group of people based on a particular fault, oversight, crime, or sin—and to do so indiscriminately and without any real and consistent standard of judgment—and thus to cancel out any hope for conversion and, likewise, any gifts they may have to give for the benefit of our community.

This is called Cancel Culture.

For example: cancel culture sees a black person stealing something and cancels out all black people by concluding: “All black people are thieves.” Or cancel culture sees a police officer being brutal to another person and concludes: “All police officers are racists.”

This list goes on. “All priests are pedophiles.” “All politicians are corrupt.” “All baseball players are steroid users.”

Judgments of an entire people based on the worst actions of a few, without any hope of conversion and without any desire for their salvation, are totally contrary to Jesus Christ. Indeed, in our humility, we must all of us add: “But for the grace of God, there go I.”

Sure, we know better than some of the past. But, if we are honest, many of the reasons why we know better is because of the mistakes—and conversion—that our forebears experienced. We should have a humble gratitude towards our past, not vitriol.

Indeed, cancel culture is not immune to mistakes. In focusing on the past, it forgets the future. It forgets that the future will judge us! And will our future generations be gentle or brutal in their judgments?—of the way we treated babies in abortion, for example, or women in pornography and the sex-slave trade, or the elderly in our neglect of them? How long will a statue of any Twenty-First Century American stand if it should stand in a Twenty-Second Century cancel culture?

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Personally, while I find the tearing down of statues lamentable for various reasons—more historical, educational, and symbolic than sentimental—I also realize that all statues come down. All nations come down. And all will be judged at the Return of The King according to their deeds and not according to the courts of popular opinion.

The battle is not simply with racism—for few, I have come to understand, are truly such. The battle is within: to fight against the devil’s temptations to judge all as racist; to fight against attitudes that cancel out people as enemy; to battle the temptation to live in a hopelessness that does not afford another conversion; to battle and refuse the temptation that says it is my right to sit as judge over all in the murkiness of it all.

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Such were my thoughts as I prayed along the stream with Jesus Christ. And I surrendered all to Him: to Him belongs the judgment, He who made the mountains and fashioned the valleys, He who gives the growth and who numbers our days.

And I resolved there and then that should I see a black man or a white man, a police officer or a politician, a baseball player or a priest, a rich man or a poor man—that I would approach them as Jesus would approach me: as a man in need of rest, of conversion, and a little hope along the way.

And as I gave all to Him, I found that there was a great victory in the battle of my heart. And there was rest. Finally.

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