Kent Beausoleil, S.J.

Preach-Out Homily (Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time: February 15, 2009)

Readings: Leviticus 13: 1-2, 44-46; 1 Cor 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

Something that most people don’t know about me is that I am an avid movie fan and I especially enjoy those timeless and changeless classic films of the past. One of the things that I especially enjoy about these classic films are their depth, the fact that in fully realized characters and powerful story-telling one is transported to a different time and place. One finds their heart and mind engaged, learns things about life, and walks away somehow transformed into a better person. So two nights ago, I sat transfixed as I watched that pure, timeless, classic work of art, a movie which stars Alicia Silverstone, and a film I am sure you are all familiar with, the forever classic film "Clueless".

The character Alicia Silverstone played was a popular female high-school student named Cher. Throughout the film Cher desires to find love and connection for herself, but she constantly would ignore those needs, not let love touch her, and instead she put all of her attention into solving other’s problems while pushing away the love from others, from friends and family. In other words, Oh my God, She shunned love in her life and shunned others, especially the yucky high-school boys of her school whom she described as being ‘like dogs, you have to clean them and feed them. They’re just like these nervous creatures that jump and slobber all over you.’

Ultimately Cher, with a flip of the hair (which being Fr. Baldy, as you can tell, I cannot unfortunately demonstrate for you), and with dripping sarcasm and a gesture of the hands dismisses them with an ‘as if’, ‘whatever.’ Through Cher I learned something problematic about our human nature, the truth that we all desire to be loved but we all can possess attitudes that hurt, that push real connection and real love away, that keep true community from happening and that is why our lesson from scripture this afternoon is so illuminating.

Let me offer an example from my life which hopefully will help to illustrate this. It had been a cold, long winter that year of 1999 in the Bronx and the mental gymnastics of the philosophy classes I was taking at Fordham were getting to me. So, that April, on the first spring like day, and feeling stir-crazy I decided after lunch to take a long bike ride down from the Jesuit Community I lived in, to the tip of Manhattan, to Battery Park and back. Now you can tell by looking at me that I am no Lance Armstrong so this was no quick zip down and back but still I truly enjoyed the exercise, the beauty of being outdoors, getting some fresh air, and taking in the sites.

The day was turning to dusk as I was riding back home, and so I was hauling butt to get back, as we had a Jesuit community meeting that night. So I am pedaling like gang-busters on a bike trail along the Hudson River not able to see clearly because of the encroaching darkness when WHAM all of the sudden my upper body connected with a wire that someone had strung across the bike trail out of joke or malice. This wire dug into my chest and biceps and flung me from my bike hard onto the rough pavement below. Fortunately, for me, two nearby security guards who witnessed this called an ambulance then rushed to see if I was alright.

At the hospital later that night the doctors determined that, beyond the massive scrapes on my legs, arms, and upper body, that the fall also broke two of my ribs and collapsed my left lung and so the doctors put a chest tube in me to re-inflate my lung. I spent the next 10 days in the hospital healing and on morphine for the pain. There, in the quiet of the hospital, lying alone on my bed during that time, I came to realize that some people have a weird disconnect with pain, with the unfamiliar, with suffering and illness.

For although I knew a lot of people in New York City and lived in a community of twenty-five Jesuit brothers, in that lonely and frightening hospital stay, and 10 week painful rehabilitation that followed, it was only the few very close friends and close Jesuit brothers that came to visit, to bring comfort, and to offer good cheer. Most of the time though I was left alone with my pain and fear. So, it’s funny, how we separate ourselves, avoid, and even shun friends, sisters, or brothers at times when they most need us. We find it difficult to know how to respond when others need care and comfort; how to move beyond our fear of the unknown; how to enter into environments such as hospitals or other places of pain and injustice, or areas where alienation, oppression, famine, and disease are present.

How often we shun any real possibility of bringing love, of bringing connection, of restoring other human beings to wholeness and letting them know they are part of a larger community who cares. Like those culprits who strung the wire across that bike path, we open the paper every day and read of humankind’s capacity to cruelty and injustice. And like those friends and brothers of mine who avoided the gift of visiting and bringing care how often do we ignore others because they are in pain, because they are different then us, because it’s easier to not reach out, to not be merciful, to not be just and to do the right thing. How easy it is – to shun.

And that is the very problem we are presented with in our reading from Leviticus. Leviticus is a book filled with rules and laws. These rules and laws were made with the intention of protecting the community of Israel but over time as people interpreted these laws for their own advantage and through misuses of power on the part of the levitical priesthood, the temple authority, who sat as judge and jury, these rules and laws began to divide, to separate those who obeyed these laws and those who did not. Injustice rather than justice dominated.

So the worst part of our human nature even today still connects with this temple priestly authority. We find ourselves easily siding with the demand that this leper be separate and we feel justified. I don’t want someone unclean near me. I don’t want someone hurting and suffering close to me. I want to push away and shun what I cannot understand. The external authority in Leviticus over time came to judge and determine without justification regarding who is in and who is not in terms of community. True leprosy back then was something indeed beyond treatment but we must ask ourselves out of compassion if every scab, or pustule, or blotch as our reading describes them, was truly leprosy, was truly worthy of condemnation.

Isn’t it quite possible that it is we, we who are quick to judge and to shun out of our ignorance or entitlement, or false need to feel superior, sometimes the one’s with the true disease? And so Paul in our reading from Corinthians condemns our individual self interests and self protecting justifications because in their narcissistic self focus they destroy the very fabric of our solidarity with others in community. Instead of building community, restoring people to wholeness, and fostering rightness in all our relationships these attitudes destroy, divide, and discriminate. Too often we are quick to judge people as unclean, or unworthy, or undesirable of our time and our care.

But imagine yourself being that poor person cast out from society, confused of the reasons for which others have deemed your life as an acceptable means for exclusion. Cast out from family and friends, from one’s livelihood, from one’s joys, called to be set apart forever and to cry ‘unclean, unclean’, living perpetually in humiliation and isolation. Will it be only then when we ourselves have lost everything that compassion for others be burnt into our hearts? Gratefully, however, we find our corrective to the levitical powers and attitudes that exclude and shun in the words and deeds of Christ.

Christ never ever shunned the lepers among him, the hurting, the marginalized, the excluded. Jesus embraces and touches all, heals them, restores them to life and full participation in the community. The Second Vatican Council calls on the common priesthood of us all, to live fully the truth of the reality, that like Christ, we all have the power to heal, to reconcile, to restore, to love. Jesus did not shun the leper, beg the leper to leave, to put on sack-cloth and ashes and cry out ‘unclean’. No, Jesus did a very holy and a very human thing, Jesus touched. In that one act of compassion Jesus brought not only healing, but wholeness, a full restoration of the person to life in the community. No longer isolated, or alone, or afraid, it is no wonder this leper with heart overflowing could no longer remain silent, for truly here a great and marvelous thing has occurred.

Our world today is filled with a wide host of lepers, the homeless, of peoples whose race is not our own, people whose sexual orientation is not our own, people with HIV, with cancer, and people filled with illness and death that we cannot begin to understand. We separate ourselves into different neighborhoods, different communities, (right dear bearcats and dear musketeers). We exclude people from being part of our clique. We would never let that dude hang with us, ‘oh no!’. Yet, our commonality reveals we are all human, all made in God’s image, all longing to love and be loved. We are beholden then to one another and responsible for each other especially responsible to those hurting, afraid, lonely, marginalized, and in need of healing.

So why is it so often difficult for our hearts these days to let anything touch it? What wires do we string up to keep other’s out, to keep us from loving as Christ does, that keep us from acting no better than pompous power-mad priests of prejudice that parcel out who is worthy of love and healing and who is not. Those starving in Africa, those alone in hospitals, those victims of hate crimes, those homeless on the street, the lonely and loveless, they can’t touch me, and hell if I am gonna touch them. Don’t ask me to love, to be compassionate, to ask me to be upset about injustice, to care.

And yet Christ touches, embraces, feels, loves. Our good news today is then two-fold. First, Jesus gives us a different way of being and relating. Jesus breaks down the walls of discrimination and exclusion, claiming every human soul as worthy to be loved, worthy of wholeness, worthy of inclusion. Second, we believe in the good news that we are all are called to the royal priesthood, a priesthood that imitates Christ’s role as the one who empathizes with our human weakness so that by loving, touching, and healing we bring hope to the hopeless and light to those whose life is dark. We live then as Christians with the grace that in Christ, true love, healing, and compassionate community can thrive. When we act in ways that imitate Jesus, the good and merciful priest, and act not as the Levitical priest, we bring the very heart of God’s love to others. We need then to be priests who care, who touch and can be touched, who love.

As Jesuit father, Walter Burghardt once wrote in Grace on Crutches, ‘a priest without compassion, whose guts don’t quiver before bloated bellies and empty eyes, who reddens not with anger over injustice, who does not hurt when I hurt . . . this robot is not really a priest, and does not walk in the footsteps of the Lord’. Yesterday we celebrated, the feast of Saint Valentine’s, the one day we set aside and honor the power of love in our midst. Our God looks down on us this day calling us to see that the power of love in our midst should be honored everyday, for everyday Jesus graces us with love’s possibility.

God asks us to lower those wires of discrimination, to get over ourselves and our attitudes of ‘as if’ and ‘whatever’, and see a world so in need of the healing touch of love. As student’s, faculty, and ministers of the University of Cincinnati and of Xavier University we are also part of the larger community of the human race; as priest’s of God. Our energy, our enthusiasm for life, our ability to risk, our capacity to be touched and touch others with love, and our sense of justice can be a powerful witness, if we let it, to the presence of Christ in our midst. Christ missions us then with the power to love, to be instruments of healing, to be builders of communities of care and compassion. We move out into the world, like the leper who was touched and healed, and proclaim the good news of how Christ has touched us. We are called to bring love and healing for we have found our hope in Christ, and like him we can never again be silent, never again be absent from our own or other’s needs, never again shun – for so touched, we cannot but preach the good news of faith’s all-embracing hope. (supplemental scriptural background from Walter Burghardt and Donald L. Fischer).

Peace,

Father Kent