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Today's gospel (Luke 5: 33-39) takes us back to reflections we made on Mark 2: 18-22 from January this year. Some of Jesus' critics question why his disciples do not fast, and Jesus tells them that as long as the disciples are with the Bridegroom, it is not fitting that they fast ... but that a time for fasting will come. It is probably worth noting that while penance is a deeply unfashionable not to say enduringly unpleasant feature of our religion, it is one which comes from the Lord himself. As he says elsewhere, “Unless you do penance, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13: 5).” We can only embrace penance, however, out of love. Penance is a gift as much as joy is.
But let us dwell on the paradox here. We are the disciples insofar as we dwell with the Bridegroom, and happily we always dwell with the Bridegroom as long as we do not lose Him through mortal sin. Jesus Himself tells us that He and the Father (and, thereby, necessarily the Spirit also) dwell in the souls of those who love Him. What is eternal life except to dwell with Him? In this limited sense, we already hold eternal life in our hands.
From this perspective, our horizons should be different from those of other human beings. We walk with another compass and guide ourselves by another map. In the final analysis, a soul living the Christian life is held in God's almighty embrace of love and returns that embrace to the God who has saved them. In the cell of the soul, our faith can be filled with the power of His presence. Here I am, Lord, we say. Here I am, love, He replies.
But here comes the paradox. While in one way we are with the Bridegroom, in another way we are still wayfarers on our journey towards the wedding. While He dwells in our souls, our attention and our hearts are constantly surrounded by the things of this world, and being the fallen creatures we are, our minds and hearts too often seek their happiness there. And we are fallen creatures! If any man thinks he can stand, let him take heed lest he fall, says Saint Paul. The good that we wish to do, we do not, while the evil we would avoid we sometimes do (again St Paul who is not letting us slackers off the hook!). Actually, the same wisdom about the fallibility of human nature can be found in the writers of classical antiquity. It was the poet Ovid who wrote:
I see and approve the better things,
But the worse things I follow.
Like all the paradoxes in our religion, we have to hold these two things together: that we are with the Bridegroom in the cell of our souls, but yet not with Him and on the journey. So we can rejoice because we dwell with the Bridegroom. But we should mourn because we are sinners and we need to do penance, not only to train our wills in some ascetic sense, but to share in the Bridegroom’s sufferings, to follow Him on His path, and so to help make reparation for our sins - to fill up in our bodies the sufferings wanting to the passion of Christ, as St Paul tells the Colossians. This is the new wine that is poured now into the new skins of the New Law; we do penance as in the Old Testament, but by the grace of our Saviour our suffering is now elevated into an action with and in Christ for whom we become a new instrument of His incarnation.
Those who forget either end of this paradox are in trouble. If we lose hold of the necessity of living joyfully in our hearts with the Bridegroom, we risk becoming a grim burden to ourselves (and others) for nothing alleviates the heavy atmosphere in which our hearts then live. If we lose hold of the necessity of penance, however, we become doe-eyed religious narcissists who never even think to darken the door of the confessional or make the least sacrifice for love.
We live then in joy but must season our smiles with tears until we reach our journey's end. This is how the fiat in joy and the fiat in sorrow touch.
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