Richard Bollman, S.J.

33rd SUNDAY B November 15 2009

Daniel 12:1-3; Hebrews 10:11-14; Mark 13:24-32

"Finding Balance in Troubled Times"

This section of Mark’s Gospel makes more sense if you go back to verse 1,

where Jesus speaks of the Temple, its eventual ruin, and the aftermath.

It is a message given to the disciples, and to Mark’s community in Rome,

to people who lived with this one question:

the times are bad now, but what can we expect of the future?

Things are so unstable.

Will we survive the possible end of it all, the way things are now?

Will it be 2012?

The good news is: we are not the first to feel these troubles.

Jesus invites that we reach to a very large perspective!

Temples have been destroyed, civilizations have risen and fallen too.

And the word of faith is: when such change happens,

God is very near; the power and kingdom of God is very near.

Something we don’t create is happening and will happen.

I don’t know what to do with the big picture, the big worries.

I take heart that in evil times, there are some good people who give witness,

not only with their ministry, but with their lives.

For example, the 6 Jesuit university men

who were shot 20 years ago this very week at the Jesuit

University of Central America.

Or the four American women church workers raped

and hurriedly buried in El Salvador 25 years ago. In December.

The good news in all this?

The meaning of the Kingdom is clearer to me

in martyrdom, witness like this, these men and women,

others that you know.

The rights of human beings, the forgivness of sins,

this meaning of these things becomes clearer, stronger,

in the blood of those

who are killed for what they can do.

Something we don’t create is happening for our good, and will happen.

I know the influence of the Jesuit faculty and the religious women in Salvador

is far greater now than before those bloody events.

You wonder whether in the suicides and threats of terrorism

other kinds of hopes might be growing . . . . decades of change

feel terrible as you live through them,

then you look back and see a pattern, transformation.

Something we don’t create is happening for our good. And will happen.

The scripture has only this to say:

However you feel vulnerable, God holds on to you.

That’s the holy place: our danger, our vulnerability.

And don’t scare yourself looking ahead.

Pay attention to the present.

Three things are important about the present.

First of all, if we’re going to trust God’s hand in our affairs,

we have to give up the other things we use

to distract us or make the pain go away: the old palliatives:

the shopping or drinking or old stuffy prejudices that dismiss our enemies,

none of this works anymore. We are being tested and changed.

So notice how your addictions scream at you, and allow for the change to come.

The second thing: act for the good you can do right in front of you.

The next right thing. Do that. Lighten your carbon footprint: that’s a good thing.

Pay attention to people’s real stories, what they go through,

without interupting or solving their problems.

This makes for new peace in the family, in the world.

Carry food to the hungry, or give alms to alleviate suffering,

tutor children who are at risk, talk to someone who asks for a handout.

We have to respect the details of this world that groans and crumbles,

and speaks to us.

So, as you let go of your addictions to escape,

pay attention to the real world that speaks to you day after day.

And a third thing: come to understand then that this present place

is the place where we’ve all been called to be.

Be glad about that. Fall in love with it.

Find you balance. If you want to surf the waves,

you need to get to know the wave; don’t watch the shore.

You’ll be swamped.

I am continually moved by a diary kept by a Jewish woman

older than Anne Frank,

but also living in Holland before the Jewish deportations.

Her name is Etty Hillesum: her book now published years later

is called "An Interupted Life."

"Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise you one thing, God, just one very small thing. I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice.

"I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me:

We must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.

"There are, it is true, some who even at this late stage are putting their vacuum cleaners and silver forks and spoons in safe keeping

instead of guarding you, dear God.

There are those who want to put their bodies in safe keeping

but whose bodies are nothing more now

than a shelter for a thousand fears and bitter feelings.

And they say ‘I shan’t let them get me into their clutches,’

But they forget that no one is in their clutches who is in your arms."

What a great gift, this spirit of a woman recorded here more than 60 years ago.

What she could not do, which was to turn the tide of the holocaust,

her spirit continues to do even now,

because she inspires hope in God,

hope in the human community,

hope that can even live through our tribulations.

That little faith that we live by, even yours in this room tonight,

it has radical strength. It is where God lives now.

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Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, pp.186-87.