Friends
Peace be with you.
One of my favorite television shows is called Grand Designs. It’s a British television series that is hard to find in America. There are some streaming platforms that carry a few episodes. It’s not totally unlike other renovation shows except that, generally, when they renovate something in Great Britain, it’s several hundred years old. When something is that old here in the United States, we tear it down. Over there, on this program anyway, they generally salvage what they can, repurpose it if they can’t salvage it, and only throw it away if it’s completely beyond repair. I look at the bricks, most of the time the buildings are made from bricks, and just think about how incredible that this material is. It takes some tuckpointing, on occasion, but it survives floods and derechos and sometimes even fire, as in the case of Notre Dame in Paris, but continues to do what it was intended to do: protect the people on the inside from inclement weather and from unwanted visitors on the outside.
Please listen again to the second reading from the First Letter of St. Peter. “Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God…” Think about all the things we have to do to be accepted by human beings. Do you remember the first time you realized there are hard and fast rules of fashion that, if you don’t follow them, people will make fun of you? I remember being in middle school gym class and learning, at the time, that you can’t wear black socks with shorts and tennis shoes. I think you can do it now with black shorts and black shoes, in fact I think you have to wear it with that combination but, back in my day, it was a major fashion faux pas. It was decided a few years ago that cargo shorts are no longer in fashion and only old people wear them. I’m lucky because, as a priest, I wake up and put on the same uniform and go about my day but, especially among our young people, fashion has to take up a certain amount of your mental energy or you will not be accepted by people. It’s not just fashion, though, it’s what you watch, what kind of technology you have, what kind of car you drive, how you cut your hair, and so forth. All of these choices determine who, in society, will accept us and who will reject us.
The trouble comes when we think that these dysfunctional judgements are equivalent to the judgment of God. We come before God, not like a actor hoping to be cast in a role, but as a stone. The world looks at rocks like they are, at best, background decoration. God looks at stones like they are the bricks with which he will build the church. St. Peter, the rock, goes on to say, “...let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” What kind of house is God building us up to be? One that is also a holy priesthood that offers spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ. In other words, we are to go before God so that he can make us into the bricks of his temple. Now, if you’ve ever been to Jerusalem, you know the temple bricks aren’t like any other bricks. Some of them have existed for almost three thousand years. We go to God who can make us into these huge, long lasting bricks in a building that is meant for the sole purpose of honoring God.
I think We have a tendency to make the spiritual life too difficult. We mandate things, even good things like the rosary or the divine mercy chaplet or a novena, instead of seeing our life as freely allowing God to build us up into his temple. When the saints mandate prayers, they always do so with an eye that people have to freely choose to do it and the mandate is simply stating what is best for us, not meant to put up unreasonable expectations or make salvation seem like a series of hoops to jump through.
That’s why God’s love is so unconditional. God loves us and cares deeply for us. How do we feel called today to let him remind us of that?
