Friday, Week 3 Ordinary time

Yesterday, I recalled David’s greatness. He was an extraordinary man with amazing natural talent and he was blessed with God’s favor. But, as we learn in today’s first reading, he did some terrible things. The Jews are the most extraordinary people for their willingness to remember and share their history with its glory and its shame. We cannot call ourselves Christians if we have not received from the Jews their self-effacing honesty.

King David has subdued his enemies and now reigns peacefully in Jerusalem. He can afford the sporting leisure of kings: to send his army to ravage neighboring countries as he indulges his proclivities at home, one of his proclivities being the lovely Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

He does not know it but David is suffering a profound and disorienting loneliness. While he has subjects beneath him there is no one equal to him and no one over him. He is at the top of his particular pyramid. He can trust no one as a peer for they are all political players, jostling and maneuvering in his court. He has no human authority over him to direct his energies or command his reverence. His only ambition is to remain on top. He is suffering the privilege of freedom.

In his History of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell explains how European citizens, enamored of freedom but terrified of its responsibilities, ceded their freedom to one man. He represented the State, which had become a secular religion far more vicious, controlling and powerful than Christianity had ever been. These “liberated” citizens loved, worshipped and admired that one man, and fervently believed without a shred of evidence in his inalienable right to do as he pleased. Such men were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and a host of others.

But I have known men and women who lived alone and, within their own homes, were dictators. There was no one to tell them when to get up, go to bed, get dressed, eat, study, pray or clean up the house. They watch television to all hours, gossip about neighbors as if they were characters in a soap opera, and care about soap operas as if they were real people. They live in fear of going out because their only entertainment is the television, which nightly terrifies them with crime stories.

Eventually their children are appalled at what has become of the parents who once had such dignity. They make animal sounds they would not tolerate in their children, and use words they not supposed to know. And they cannot see how they are deteriorating physically, mentally, and spiritually. When their children try to act on their behalf, perhaps setting boundaries upon their behavior, they blow them off. They dismiss the authority that love gives their adult children.

They are like trees that would grow tall and straight in a forest of trees, but in an open field spread out in every direction. They know no boundaries and will fight fiercely to avoid the nursing home they so desperately need.

Human beings need authority. We disintegrate without it. Our holy father Saint Francis began his religious life in pursuit of Poverty. That was the greatest good he could imagine. If Jesus was poor, then poverty had to be the simplest, easiest, most direct and most pleasant way to eternal happiness. But Saint Francis eventually had to conform to the life of the community he had founded, even when it did not live poverty as well as he wanted. He wore the clothes they told him to wear; accepted the medical care they pressed upon him, and honored the authorities of his Order despite their obvious shortcomings. Saint Francis realized that obedience is more sacred and more demanding than poverty; it leads more directly to union with the One who was subject to Mary, Joseph, Annas, Caiphas, Herod, Pontius Pilate, Death and God his Father.

P.S -- Given the dangers of isolating oneself, I appreciate my readers' effort to react, respond or reproach me for anything I have written.