Not two years after our oldest grandson was born he had a new sister. I was taking care of them shortly after her arrival and I was able to watch his reaction to this usurper of my lap. He had been shown, and told, how he must act with a tiny baby, but he liked to probe the borders of the sanctioned behavior, looking for holes. Sometimes, he just made his own opening, and crawled right through. I was holding the baby on my lap as he and I tossed a tennis ball back and forth. When it was his turn, he took the ball, stepped right in front of his sister, said the proper penitential formula, “I sorry,” and threw the ball at her head. The story is funny only because he was small, and didn't yet have much of an arm. But if there wasn’t great power behind the throw, there was plenty of will. It took me back. I recall walking in upon my daughter as she peeked over the side of her newborn brother’s bassinet. She was saying softly, but not tenderly, “Go home, baby, go home.” She meant it. She had seen all his tricks and she was ready for him to move on.
Living in community is hard.
So it seems both fitting and wise that the long Sundays of Summer Ordinary Time begin with a feast of community, Trinity Sunday. For Ordinary Time, those stretches marking the weeks between high seasons and feasts, perfectly mirrors our own lives. We have weddings and funerals and anniversaries and graduations, when we bring out the cameras and everyone smiles and stands close together and we choose the best prints to remember ourselves and our families. We will bring out those photos and say, “This was our life; this is how we lived it,” but neither the feast days nor the pictures tell the whole story.
Most of our lives are spent in ordinary time, just living, day by day, with other people. This is how we live: The rough edges of her needs rubbing against the rough edges of his, our preferences doing battle with theirs. Your wet laundry getting dumped on top of the machine so mine can go in the dryer first, “Because I need this shirt right now!” We would be surprised to hear ourselves screaming. We would be dismayed to find it captured on film, but there it is, the heartbreak and the glory of ordinary time, our failure both to live well with others and our refusal to stop trying.
The problem, of course, is that Trinity Sunday usually brings examples of symmetrical mathematical formulas — the shell, the white and the yolk are separate elements, but one egg — when it ought to bring stories of the asymmetrical work of living in community. Because that’s the mystery this feast celebrates, that life in God is life in community. Look into God’s heart and you will find a community. And, here’s the wonder, no one in the community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is lobbing balls at the others. No one is saying, Go home.” They are home, and they are distinct, and they are one.
Jesus speaks often of this common life in John’s gospel. “I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” he says. These are unsettling words to a culture which prizes privacy and the boundaries that keep the unwanted and unwelcome at bay. Yet Jesus promises that the day will come when we “will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I am you.”
Jesus says of his Father, “Everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine,” startling words to a people who are loath to lend their cars to one another, much less act as if everything in their possession belonged to another.
When Jesus tells the disciples he is leaving, he counsels them to take heart; that he will not leave them orphans. They will receive “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name.” This Advocate, Jesus tells the disciples, will “be with you always…and will be in you.” Personal space is not part of the promise.
My daughter, the one who urged her brother to hit the road, taught for a summer at a Holy Cross school in Uganda. The students were curious about problems and difficulties in America. A land so rich, they thought, must surely be without troubles.
She spoke of the many homeless people in our streets.
The room was filled with AIDS orphans, all of whom had been taken in by someone. People suffered in Uganda, she saw, but they suffered with others. Everyone found a place. No one died alone.
A boy raised his hand. “Have you no rooms?” he asked.
My daughter recalls that she didn’t know what to say. How could she explain the home gyms and home theatres, the family rooms and great rooms and offices and wine cellars and dressing rooms and sewing rooms, rooms that were made to house, not people, but equipment? How could she explain all the bathrooms, all private? How could she explain the guest rooms that never saw a guest?
But Jesus speaks of being in the Father and of the Father being in him, and of the Spirit being in we followers of Jesus, and of us being in him. A feast of such close quarters — and such peace — is a feast we need to claim and celebrate.
Trinity Sunday is followed by the Feast of Corpus Christi, as if the church were saying, “All this singing about the Trinity and life in community and glimpses into the total sharing that is the life of God, well, you may wonder how it’s done. Just be ready to lay down your life, your flesh and blood, for your brothers and sisters.” We hear Mark’s gospel this year and his stark re-telling of the night before Jesus’ death, when he was sitting at table with his disciples. While they were eating, he took bread, and said the blessing, broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take it; this is my body.’
“Take it,” no holding back or holding on, just the command, “take it; this is my body,” which, as Paul will later tell us, “is given up for you.”
All through these days of ordinary time, we will hear Paul speaking of how to live the life in common that is life in God; that is the life of God. On the seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. He reminds them of their unity in Christ. He tells them Christians have one hope, a hope rising from the one Lord, one faith and one baptism they share in common. But how to live as one?
Paul tells them they must practice humility before one another. Humility comes from remembering that we are not God, and can claim neither God’s perfection nor power. Every parent ever tempted to violence by a smashed fender or a ruined couch or a public tantrum knows the importance of humility to life in community.
He says they must be gentle with one another and show patience for all. Patience is not a grand good. It is a good for ordinary time and ordinary life, for the long grocery line and a mate’s over-told joke and the dinner time whine and the muddied floor. It is not a grand good, but it is a necessary one if people are to live together. Gentleness is the practice the strong must keep towards children and the elderly and the ill. The strong can impose order on the weaker and smaller by force, but then it will not be, as Paul writes, life “in a manner worthy of the call you have received.”
Later in the same letter, the portion we hear on the nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Paul turns from what Christians must practice and turns to what they must put away.
All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice.
Anyone who lives in community knows that the positive commands (“Love one another”) are never alone sufficient. There is always someone who believes that love is best served by a slap in the face, and best communicated by screaming. So, the leaders of the household have to set out, not only what is good and should be encouraged, but what is harmful and will not be allowed. My young son once responded to a parental homily of mine on “not hitting,” which, I assured him, Jesus never did, by saying simply, “Well, Jesus didn’t like to hit, but I do.” Since I was in no position to argue with him over the hidden years of Jesus’ childhood, I was compelled to do what I should have done before I turned to sermonizing and simply say, and mean it, “Don’t hit. Anyone. If you do hit, you will be pulled out of the sandbox and taken home.”
Paul describes what Christian life together free of “all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting and reviling” looks like. It looks like kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, the same forgiveness granted us by the Father through the Son.
At the end of this reading, Paul urges us “to be imitators of God,” suggesting that life within the Trinity itself is marked by kindness, compassion and forgiveness. We usually think of compassion as a human attribute, the capacity to be moved by another’s suffering and to feel it, somehow, as our own. But it precisely these qualities of kindness, compassion and forgiveness which God has shown us in Christ. Jesus freely enters into, and shares our pain as his own. If compassion is the act of sharing suffering, kindness is the quality which gives rise to compassion. Jesus reveals kindness and compassion to be, first, divine attributes. This willingness to share our suffering leads Jesus to know sin and separation from the Father on the cross. Forgiveness is the act of being restored and returned to relationship after a time of alienation. This, too, God knows.
On the twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, Paul gives us the best, and perhaps least understood, example of imitating God in our households and communities in his description of Christian marriage. “Be subordinate to one another,” he tells husbands and wives. Because we get stuck — in preaching, and unfortunately, in practice — on the next sentence, “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord,” we fail to see how this reading illuminates the mystery of the Trinity with which these days began. When Paul tells husbands to “love your wives, even as Christ loved the church,” we have an image of total and mutual self-giving. Husbands are to love their wives even if it means, as it did for Christ, emptying themselves and assuming the form of a slave. They are to love their wives even if it means, as it did for Christ, giving up their very lives.
Paul describes a relationship in which preference is never prized over person. In this marriage nothing is held back, all — life, time, possessions, work — is shared, arms stretched always one to another, until, like the arch of John Ciardi’s poem, Most Like an Arch This Marriage, their “weaknesses lean into a strength.”
Most Like an Arch This Marriage
BY JOHN CIARDI
Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.
Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.
Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what’s strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss
I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.
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