Friends
Peace be with you.
In order to become a priest, you have to take a certain number of college credits in philosophy. In fact, most priests either majored or minored in philosophy because of this. I found this out during my first semester at Loras and was a little surprised. I assumed I’d be spending most if not all my time learning about theology, the study of God. When I asked why we were studying philosophy, I was told that it was hard to explain but that I was just supposed to trust it was important. Being somewhat of a hands-on type of person, there were plenty of times in those first couple of years when I wondered why I was thinking about whether I could think about thinking about thinking. A couple of years in, I asked again why we were learning so darn much philosophy and the same priest told me that the concepts underlying philosophy would be the basis for some of the concepts in theology. I could appreciate that answer and I could definitely see that to be true but I was at least a little skeptical because a lot of concepts would clearly never be used and I honestly prayed I could one day forget Aristotle's definition of four causes or Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative or the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. I had a sense that, other than a passing negating reference like this one, I was almost certainly never going to drop the phrase "categorical imperative" into the middle of a homily. It wasn’t until I was taking a class with a group of Lutheran and Presbyterian seminarians, that I realized why we studied philosophy. We were studying a part of Matthew’s gospel and taking turns offering a brief sermon on the passage. Being the only Roman Catholic in the group, I was already nervous that they'd all accuse me of too much works theology. One of the other students preached about how, since Jesus didn’t mention some act in a particular passage, he must have been fine with doing it. I raised my hand and informed her that she was relying on an argument from silence for one of the main points of her sermon and, as we all know, an argument from silence is the weakest form of argument. The preacher shot me a confused and angry look as though I just called her a bad name. Thankfully, the Lutheran professor intervened and told her I was right that her sermon wasn't logical and she then informed me that they didn’t have to take philosophy so I should be a little more careful in assuming what everyone knew.
In the second reading, St. Paul is writing to his disciples from prison, exhorting them to believe in the same things that have landed him there. Scholars believe St. Paul dictated this letter to someone outside his cell who brought it to Ephesus and possibly other towns as well. His focus is on unity, as you can hear so clearly in the seven words following the word "one". St. Paul starts off chapter four talking about five traits that will foster this unity. He exhorts his readers to live lives filled with “humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace.” Let’s briefly spend some time with each of these.
Humility, in both the Greek of the Bible and in English, has the same root word as dirt or earth. To be humble means recognizing that we all came from dirt and that no one should be better than anyone else. It doesn’t mean sitting by and watching someone make mistakes but, instead, recognizing it could just as easily be you if you do decide to correct them
Gentleness, I learned, doesn’t mean being a wimp. It is a balance between being too angry and never being angry at all. It means seeking peace but correcting in a fraternal manner when provoked. We don’t have to let our house be burned down but we can stop the people from doing so without burning theirs down as well.
Patience means recognizing that someone else’s timeline may be longer than ours, although it does recognize that there is a timeline. There are some things that have to get done by a certain time.
Still, I think there’s a reason St. Paul next lists, bearing with one another through love, because sometimes people have idiosyncrasies that patience struggles to overcome. Have you ever become annoyed when someone repeatedly uses a phrase like “like” or “um” in a sentence. I did that one day and, the very next day, I was in a meeting and I was very nervous. Towards the end of the meeting, one of the people stopped and said, “I’m sorry this might be the fact that I haven’t had enough coffee or sleep but would you mind not clicking that pen?” and I realized I was doing it without really thinking about it. The fact that he didn’t explode at me or simply make fun of me later but asked me to stop and made me aware of this fault in a way that didn’t embarrass me and was loving was a great example of bearing with one another through love.
St. Paul finishes this list of qualities we need for unity with striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. This is ultimately a reminder that unity is a charism, a gift of the Holy Spirit, that is given to us in our desire for peace.
In this world, there are a lot of divisions, divisions in the church, divisions in our parish, divisions in our family, divisions in our country, and, if we’re honest, probably even divisions between the person we are and the person we’d like to be. As you hear these five qualities that undergird Christian unity, what is one of them you most need to ask the Holy Spirit to increase in you or your family or our parish or our church that will help increase the unity the Holy Spirit is bringing about?
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