This last Monday, aside from being our national celebration of Labor Day, was the feast of St. Theresa of Calcutta, known throughout the last decades of her life as Mother Theresa.
During my semester in Rome during college seminary, I had the honor of working alongside the Missionary Sisters of Charity—the Religious Order founded by St. Mother Teresa, at a house for destitute men near the Coliseum there in Rome. Many of those sisters had been with Mother from the beginning of the order and certainly embodied her spirit—patience and love for the poor. And at this house for the destitute, men—mostly homeless men—would come off the streets and would be fed and bathed and treated with dignity and respect. The sisters were breathtakingly patient and gentle as they treated these men as they would treat Jesus himself. And they did so because that was Mother Theresa’s gift to them. She modeled for them, and for us, how to love Jesus in the poorest of the poor.
When anyone met Mother Teresa, they were often shocked at the fact that no matter how busy she was and no matter how many other people were around, when she talked to you, you felt like you were the only person in the world. She gave you her total attention, her total love, her total self every moment. It was as if the whole rest of the world dropped away and ceased to exist while she was talking to you. She wasn’t looking past you to see if there was someone more important in the room. She wasn’t bothered because of the other duties she had to attend to. She wasn’t trying to get back home so she could sit on her couch to veg-out or binge her favorite television show or get home to get dinner going. She certainly was not concerned what other people would thing about her by talking to you.
Why did she do that that? How did she do that? For one, it’s because of her prayer life. She made a daily Eucharistic holy hour, and mandated her sisters do the same, no matter what. She gave Jesus her full loving attention in prayer, and was thereby able to give you her full loving attention.
Secondly it’s because she had come to know Jesus’ love for her. She knew that Jesus died for her—not just for general, collective “humanity”; she knew that if she had been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would have done no less for her than he did for all of us.
God loves you, each of you, every ounce of you—warts and all. And his love for you is perfect. God’s love is not divided, as if each of us only receive one 6 billionth of his love and attention. God loves each individual with the entirety of his love.
And that’s important to keep in mind as we consider our scripture readings this weekend. In the parables of the finding of the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son in the Gospel today, we are to come to recognize that we cannot be lost to God’s attention or to God’s love. Even when we turn our backs on God, God is search for us. We cannot become lost amidst the nameless, faceless masses. None of us are nameless or faceless to God.
It is possible to turn our backs on God—to try to hide from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden hiding from God out of shame for their sin. We can separate ourselves from the life of the flock—from the family of God, the Church. We can engage in a life of dissipation outside of the Father’s house in sin.
Like the first son in the Gospel parable—we can act on the dumb idea that we’ll be happier if we just make our own way—if we claim our independence from the Father. But, that’s what sin is, isn’t it? Claiming independence from God and his ways? I’ll do it my way, thank you very much.
But like the prodigal son, that ends in disaster—unhappiness, unfullfilment, misery. If we just trusted God—and stopped playing games with God—and his simple call to holiness—we would be so less depressed.
The real turn in the parable is when the son feels something knocking on his heart. He recognizes everything he has lost because of his choices, and decides to return to the house of his Father.
But then, in the Gospel parable, there was another son, and this second son had remained in the Father’s house. But, there was something lost about him as well—an emptiness. He was lost because he did not share his father’s joy at his brother’s homecoming. Love for his brother had at some point died in his heart. And without love, there can be no joy.
The two sons are two different dangers for Christians. The first danger is that we justify wandering from the Church—embarking on a lifestyle of sin—that brings its own joylessness and emptiness. The second danger, is that those who remain must never lose our love for our brothers and sisters who wander. If we do, it can result in joylessness, bitterness. Those of us who lose love for the sinner, will not know the joy of the Church’s mission to reconcile sinners to God. God forbid we become like that second brother.
To borrow an idea from Pope Francis…why would anyone become Catholic if all they encounter are scowling, bitter, joyless, complaining sour-pusses. Or the cold, silent treatment. A life-long Catholic annoyed at a stranger sitting in their seat. Someone parked in my spot. Someone is encroaching on my territory. Someone who doesn’t know the right time to sit, stand, kneel. What are they doing here? I never left. We must never harden our hearts against embracing the lost--and those trying to find their way home.
How can we assure that doesn’t happen. Again, like Mother Theresa, prayer enlivens the heart. We need to lovingly gaze upon the face of Jesus in prayer, especially in the Eucharist, so that we can attend to Him in other people. That which you did for the least of my brethren you did for me.
There was a sister who complained to Mother Theresa. Mother, why do we have to waste our time with the daily holy hour. There are children dying in the streets of starvation and disease. The holy hour takes us away from the real work. To which mother replied, sister, because you believe this, you need two hours every day. She wasn’t kidding.
May our parish always be a place where the lost are embraced and God’s love is joyfully celebrated and shared, where loving attention is given, where God’s children are serious about the sort of prayer that enlivens and emboldens charity, and where the Gospel is learned, cherished and lived out, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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