Yes!

This is an extra blog reflection for today because apart from being the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, it is also the feast of St Therese of Lisieux, one of our Carmelite patrons. Fittingly, today's gospel (Matt 21: 28-32) is rather Colwelian in its implications.

              Jesus tells a parable about two sons who are asked by their father to go and work in the vineyard. The first one says ‘no’, but later thinks better of it and goes to do his father's will. The second one says ‘yes’ but then does nothing about it.

              Right at the heart of the charism of COLW is the mystery of our ‘yes’ to God in imitation of Mary. Our minds dwell on the mystery of the Annunciation, that point in history when humanity, who had heard God's commands and failed to keep them, now yielded in the person of Mary and said ‘yes’ again to the creator. Mary’s ‘yes’ becomes the antidote for Eve’s ‘no’, paving the way for our second Adam, Christ. And in this mystery, we find a symbol and a source of our own calling to say ‘yes’ and ‘thank you’ to God in every moment of our lives.

We know that there is always the potential to betray that ‘yes’. St Philip Neri’s favourite prayer was, “O Lord, don't trust Philip.” This was no humble braggadocio. Philip knew he was not reliable. None of us are really, not wholly. In other words, Philip knew - and we ourselves need to come to realise the same thing about ourselves - that we must be like the tax collectors and prostitutes who, Jesus said, believed in the message of John the Baptist. We know that Jesus told sinners to go and sin no more. We cannot imagine that Jesus held any other position on this point than the position of John the Baptist who continued to preach repentance to Herod, even at the cost of his own life. The tolerance of Jesus for those who are slow to say ‘yes’ (pretty much all of us at any given moment), and his inclination to dine with those shunned by the Pharisees, is not accommodationism but a necessary condition of the quest of the Good Shepherd for the sheep who are lost. The terrible moment for Herod was not the preaching of John but the determined silence of Jesus during his passion.

The moral map of Jesus and the moral map of the Pharisees were quite different in some regards. Both Jesus and the Pharisees would have condemned the traitors’ injustice of the tax collectors and the money-getting impurity of the prostitutes. But Jesus sets aside the ritual shunning of the sinner which seems to class the sinner as out of the reach of any compassion. Instead, Jesus’ actions anticipate the words of Saint Paul. How will they hear without a preacher?

But, if it thereby becomes necessary for Jesus to spend time with the tax collectors and prostitutes, it is all the more important for the tax collectors and prostitutes to spend time with Jesus. We tend to see ourselves in this gospel scene as the ones who are meant to follow Jesus' example, and of course that is true. But we are also the tax collectors and the prostitutes. We are! We have to listen to Jesus. If we do not listen to Jesus - if we surround ourselves with the voices who do not speak his truth or who twist his truth – then, who exactly are we listening to and what will become of us? This is why Lectio Divina is such an important practice for COLW members. We cannot say our ‘yes’, however slowly and hesitantly, if we do not listen to Him day by day.

We say every day: O Mary teach us always to say ‘yes’ to the Lord every moment of our lives. If Mary teaches us to say ‘yes’, one of the things that helps us extend that ‘yes’ to every moment of our lives is the Little Way of St Therese of Lisieux. It is our Carmelite sister St Therese who show us in her Little Way the infinite value of every moment. We are given so many moments, like so many grains of sand, that it might seem they have no value. But the Little Way of St Therese tells us to invest every moment with the infinite love of God – even this moment, right now, which is passing through my fingers and before your eyes. When we invest every action in every moment with that love through our repeated intention, then by God's grace we turn every little ‘yes’ into a perfect echo of the ‘yes’ of Mary. Mary’s ‘yes’ paved the way for the infinite, obedient ‘yes’ of Jesus to the Father which itself becomes the source on which we all must draw to say our ‘yes’.