Friends
Peace be with you.
Tomorrow/Today would be the Memorial of St. Francis Xavier, the person about which our Catholic high school was named, if it wasn’t a Sunday. He was born in Spain to rich and powerful parents and went off to the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, at age 23. He was, by all accounts, a very bright student who intended to follow in his deceased father’s footsteps to become a lawyer and make a lot of money. However, then Francis and his roommate, Pierre Favre, gained a much older roommate named Ignatius of Loyola who was on fire with the Gospel. Ignatius convinced Pierre to become a priest but Francis remained unconvinced. He even became distrustful of Ignatius because he thought he was a joke of a student trying to convince everyone to become a priest. However, when Ignatius and Francis were left alone one weekend, Ignatius convinced Francis that his life would be better if he were to give up his drive for wealth and, instead, give it all up for the Lord. These three roommates would eventually be among a small group of people to found the Jesuit order, which transformed the church and the world by being both intensely intellectual and passionately faithful.
In both the first reading and gospel, we hear the message of being prepared. The first reading said, “Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways!” The gospel, similarly, said “...you do not know when the lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.” One pithy summary I read of this message from the old cartoon The Far Side showed a bunch of people in an office while a man in a suit comes swooshing into the picture saying, “Jesus is coming! Look busy!” If you’ve ever worked in a business where you had to look busy when the boss was coming, you may know what this is like. However, if you have been a supervisor, you probably know this doesn’t really work. You can generally spot an employee who is just looking busy, either because they fall behind on their work or because the quality isn’t there or because an angry co-worker lets you know. When it comes to being a disciple of Jesus, we don’t want to just look busy. We want to be busy with the work of God when he comes.
But what prevents us from being busy and not just looking busy? First, we have to know what the work of God is. We have to know what we’re supposed to be doing. This is a challenge because our part in salvation has less to do with work and more to do with being loved and loving . We are called to love God and be loved by God in prayer and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Do we take time throughout the day to sit with God in prayer letting him show how much he loves us and letting him know how much we love him? With regard to loving our neighbor as ourselves, would we want someone gossiping about us to someone else instead of talking directly to us about something? Would we want someone treating us like an object of their pleasure? I hope you would answer no to these last two questions and see why we need to trim out gossip and objectifying other people to love them like ourselves.
Still, it can be difficult to take the steps to do that, which is why knowledge is just the start. Next comes the hard part of convincing ourselves to change. We may need to respectfully and lovingly admit that some gossipy relationships cannot be reformed and simply need to pass away for the good of both parties. We may need to convince ourselves that our life would be better off without an hour or two of television per week in order to committ to an hour of adoration. The hardest thing for me in my life is to not allow my comfort zone to get in the way of my commitments. There have been so many times in my life when I have said I can’t do something because I’m not good enough or smart enough or patient enough or strong enough or whatever enough. I gave up before I even tried. We can’t give up on ourselves and be content with the little box we put ourselves in. God has big plans for us!
In the end, St. Francis Xavier had to let go of his aspiration of being a rich and powerful lawyer to follow the more radical path God had for him in the priesthood as a Jesuit. God has a path planned out for each of us. Are willing to sit with him in prayer and set aside our comfort zones to follow wherever he leads us?
