29th Thursday of the Year (25 Oct 2018)
Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J. during Full Spiritual Exercises
Full of It. . .
...Fear, that is. I was a timid child. Maybe my first tramua contributed to that. My first trauma was my mother gone. It is a dim twilight on the horizon of my memory. Its details I learned years later: our aunt came to drive mom to a baby shower. I wouldn’t nap—during which mom and my aunt would have gone to the shower. Mom left me with my sister—then was gone.
As my sister recounted that I felt my fear afoot within me. I did not relive it; I felt its distant rumbling: distant yet real, like a rumble heard but not yet recognized as thunder.
My first fear seeped into me. Going to school was wrenching: I had to leave mom. I did come to enjoy school very much. In high-school my gran-dmother, who always lived with us—how close grandma and I were—in high-school grandma died. First I raged because she left me; then rage morphed into phantom guilt, and I kept people distant—though many never noticed what I felt and what it did within me; even I didn’t notice!
Things, possessions distracted me from my fear and my loss; they never eased them. So furtive its grasp that I was unaware. Recently I’ve grown aware that fear lurked in the 12 years between my ordination as a priest and my entering the Jesuits. I grew in those years, to be sure; yet fear frustrated my free choice to live my priesthood as a vowed religious.
Looking at myself over time did not show me flaws; rather, that fear is always lurking in my life. Fear is universally human with individual symptoms. Jesus encouraged not to fear in the face of threats to oneself. Do not fear those who kill the body….1 He then encouraged not to allow fear to control us through things. What possessions can do! Recall the one who saw Jesus as an arbitrator; Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me?….2 Possessions led him to make an inappropriate request of Jesus: people outside a family did not meddle in its disputes. Seeing what possessions do Jesus told his parable of a wealthy man: not with abundant crops; he entrusted his future to them. Abundance is “an insolent quack,” a 1st-C, wealthy Roman citizen noted. “From what…evils…can riches free us, if they deliver us not even from an inordinate desire of them?”3
Fear creeps in when we want to want with Jesus. Jesus’ Spirit-peace does not always leave personal or domestic life undisturbed. In many guises fear prevents freely choosing to accept Jesus’ offer of peace. Fear is a paper-tiger. We can’t tame it; rather Jesus shreds it. Stay near Jesus to do that for you.
__________
__________
Wiki-images: by Jessie Eastland Astronomical Dusk CC BY-SA 4.0; by Valis55 Altus Segment CC BY-SA 3.0
No comments:
Post a Comment