The law of love

It is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above;
it comes down from the Father of all light (James 1:17)

Unsurprisingly, my mother has travelled to places that few antipodeans would dare venture – Libya, Jordan, the remote mountains of Turkey. Last year it was to Rarotonga.

My mother, obviously no spring chicken, is soon to travel to Canada for the long-awaited marriage of her well-beloved grandson, David. It has been a few years now since David and my mother made their way from the UK, across Western Europe, through the eastern bloc into Russia. They travelled together by road, stopping at caravan parks along the way. On that journey they were robbed near the Czech border, paid bribes in Russia and enjoyed each other’s company while discovering the treasures of Europe.

While younger members of the entourage travelling to Canada will do some heavy-duty post-wedding touring and traipsing across the border to New York, my mother keep closer to base. My nephew and his fiancée have bought a home, and now have a beautiful son.

There is too much gloom and doom in our newspapers. But it only takes a minute to double-check how rich our lives truly are.

As we return to Mark’s Gospel (Mark 7:1 – 23) this Sunday we are challenged by Jesus’ accusation against the scribes and Pharisees who were demanding to know why the disciples were not following the Jewish rules of washing before eating: You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions. The point being, that when we put tradition before the commandment to love we are well off the mark. There are certainly some things that we do that have their origin in plain old-fashioned commonsense, but which over time have lost their significance.

The distinction between respecting those who pass down tradition (the elders, as Mark calls them) and the tradition itself must be differentiated. Rejection of a tradition, does not mean rejecting those who hold fast to them. We live in a world of constant and rapid change: the Gospel does not prevent us from accepting the multitude of challenges that await us, but we must not allow the diminishment of human respect.

My mother has stories I have yet to hear, explanations for the way we do things in our family that have yet to be expressed in words. She is loved for the person she is, for the gift she is to her family – which is why her presence in Canada is so necessary. We all have a family member who embodies what it means to be a member of our family, a grandparent, great grandparent. Treasure them, love them, respect them.

Two become one

Has it only been three months since she moved out? Well, our daughter has decided to move back home, but only on one condition: that we treat her like an adult. That’s certainly our intention, although she might have forgotten that it’s a two-way proposition. Her reasons are, of course, complex and she knows that the welcome mat is always out. There is the jumble of her acquisitions strewn about the once empty hallway and the decorative pieces we placed in her room have been ejected unceremoniously into rubbish bags. It’ll only be temporary, of course, six months, a year – then she will move on. The empty nesters have a nestling, albeit, an adult.

Representations of daily life in biblical Palestine in movies and television documentaries seldom reflect the lives of women, let alone slaves, or the poorest of the poor. Women’s lives were hard. From sowing seed, harvesting, grinding grain to making bread, our lives would be unrecognisable. The role of women in society was to nurture and support the family, and that meant serving the needs of their husbands, preparing food, providing care for children.

In writing to the Ephesians (5:21 – 32) Paul explores the mystery of the Christ-dimension of marriage. It is startling at first, and it would be easy to dismiss his words as cultural determinism, as sexist, as offensive to women. He claims that the husband is the head of the wife, and she should submit to him, and he compares that relationship to Christ as being head of the church which itself submits to Christ. Husbands on the other hand ‘should love their wives as Christ loved the church’. Husbands must love their wives as they love their own body, in the same way that Christ cares for his church. And that is why, according to Paul, a man must leave his family to be joined with his wife, and the two become one body. And this, this is the mystery.

This mystery is not what roles we play – it is about love and one’s capacity to give, to be generous and selfless – that is what true submission is, it is the sharing of a singular will and desire, not power or control. Jesus’ own submission to his Father’s will is the exemplar. It is divine love.

While Paul’s analogy is about marriage and the Body of Christ it has an equal affect on all of our relationships. We are all members of the Body of Christ.

We are all much more than the sum of the roles we perform, of our public and private faces, of our singular parts. And so I welcome the return of my adult daughter, I look forward to our shared space, time and energy. I can even put up with her overflowing possessions filling the hallway.

Choosing the good life

I have a son who sports a scar on his forehead, an unwanted gift from a senseless attack on the streets of Launceston some few years ago. His assailant was drunk. Both he and the scar have healed, but it will remain a very physical reminder of that night, that incident, that moment.

Thank goodness no one can ‘read’ our lives when we meet them face to face. Knowing each other’s darker sides, or less flattering parts of our lives is something that will only occur with familiarity, friendship, quality time – unless it is splattered across the pages of your daily read. I truly admire those whose adolescent and young adult lives were blameless and pure. That wasn’t quite me and despite a desire to rewrite my early years, I had a good time. We were all young once. I’ll leave it at that.

It’s not a betrayal of family secrets, but alcoholism has touched my wider family with devastating effect – ruptured families, brain damage, death. It’s one of my greatest fears. We all know someone affected by alcoholism. Our young people’s obsession with binge drinking is a cultural aberration I link to the 6 o’clock swill mentality. They appear to have no fear of the consequences, of whose lives they will impact, of what damage they might cause. It is easy to close our collective eyes, because it is our common drug.

St Paul is utterly inelegant in his criticism (Ephesians 5:18): Don’t drug yourselves with wine, this is simply dissipation. Instead, he exhorts: be filled with the Spirit. Paul cautions that we should be careful about the lives we lead – ‘like intelligent and not senseless people’. And to be intelligent means being able to make good choices, to be able to think through and be responsible for the actions we take. When we do this and discern God’s will, then despite the wickedness that permeates our world (there are names we can give to these sins), our lives are empowered with the capacity to redeem the world in which we live.

In a week in which we have celebrated Blessed Mary MacKillop, we also remember St Maximilian Kolbe, a convert from Judaism and a Conventual Franciscan friar who died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz. How apt, then, it is that Pope John Paul II appointed him as a patron against drug addiction, and patron of drug addicts (because he was killed with a lethal injection). Here are but two lives which have contributed to the redemption of our world, wrought for us by Christ himself.

We each have such a role; we each have our contribution to make to build up the whole. It begins with you and me, with the choices I make.

MacKillop link

When Mary MacKillop visited my home town from March to May 1902, my grandmother, Marguerite, was all of 4 years old. It is not beyond imagination that Mary, who was in town for the healing, hot baths, may have attended Mass at the same time as my infant grandmother and her parents. My grandmother died six months after I was born, and yet she is but one link to this same Mary MacKillop whose 100th anniversary of death we remember this Saturday, and whose canonisation we await with a collective, bated breath.

Across this country are people, places, words and dreams that connect us to this daughter of Australia. Certainly a handsome woman, but no beauty, of ordinary, humble Scottish stock. Home educated, strong and persistent, Mary’s story is anything but ordinary. Her zeal, matched only by her faith, saw her congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart grow from zero to 130 sisters between 1867 and 1871, from one barn school in Penola to 40. She and her sisters ministered to women in poverty and distress, took in orphans, taught, visited the sick.

Nothing was easy. Mary’s rule of life caused conflict with her bishop. He excommunicated her and attempted to disband the sisters. In seeking Roman approval for her rule, she and her mentor, Father Julian Tenison Woods, had a falling out after Mary agreed to a number of changes.

There are other saintly Australians whose lives have enriched our folklore, our spirituality and even our nationhood: Maude O’Connell, founder of the Family Care Sisters; Catherine Gaffney (from Deloraine, Tasmania) who was a founding member of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration; Caroline and Archibald Chisholm – ‘The emigrant’s friends’; John Bede Polding, visionary bishop of Sydney and founder of the Good Samaritan Sisters; Ken Barker, who established and still leads the Missionaries of God’s Love within the Disciples of Jesus Covenant Community. There are thousands and thousands of others, perhaps less luminous, less famous, and each of us has been touched in some small or large way by one of them.

Mary MacKillop, like people of faith everywhere, listened to and responded to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (5:1 - 2):

Try, then, to imitate God, as children of his that he loves, and follow Christ by loving as he loved you, giving himself up in our place as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.

If this became our rule of life, what a difference we could make too. We would only be following the path laid down by many who have gone before us – my grandmother Maggie included.

Happy feast day, Mary.