Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

With admirable courtesy, Beckley WV welcomes
Muslims to their final resting place.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
Even so, on the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.

We instruct you, brothers and sisters,
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
to shun any brother
who walks in a disorderly way
and not according to the tradition they received from us.

The Christian finds herself walking a razor’s edge between the hypocrisy denounced by Jesus in today’s gospel, and the liberality Saint Paul denounced in his second letter to the Thessalonians.

If I “shun” certain people in my neighborhood, school, workplace or church, I run the risk of being called a hypocrite. If I socialize with them, I run the risk of endorsing and perhaps adopting their values.

The dilemma is more difficult for parents who want to guide their children away from bad influences and yet teach them not to be too quick to judge.

The answer, if there is one, is found in the pursuit of integrity. I understand that word to mean, “I am what I pretend to be.” If I say I am Catholic, I attend Mass at least once a week, pray daily, tithe, and participate in the life of my parish in some way.

Integrity, however, is a process, like integration. Throughout our lives we are challenged to integrate our learning and experience into a coherent story. Failure to do so can disintegrate a person.

I think especially of the returning soldier who must come to terms with what he did and what he saw in the war zone. These incidents make no sense; they don’t fit the soldier’s personal history, or the story of his family, church and neighborhood. Nor can anyone understand what he remembers so vividly. Those tours of duty are alien to the soldier, but utterly real. He or she can neither forget them nor ignore them; the memories leap up frequently before his eyes, sometimes blinding him to the people around him.

Everyone faces that dilemma in some way, though usually not with the agony of PTSD. The Sacrament of Reconciliation might be called a Sacrament of Integration. As we acknowledge and confess our sins we enter the process of integrity. Often we must admit we have no excuse for what we’ve done: “I did it; I should not have; I knew it was wrong at the time but I did it anyway.”

The New Testament prophet Zechariah celebrated the Birth of John the Baptist with:

And you, child, will be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins….

God gives us Integrity/salvation as we accept forgiveness of our sins. Even the most heinous crimes make sense in the story of my life. I am neither proud nor ashamed of them. But the memory of them helps me to appreciate the superabundant goodness of God. 
It is so high you can't get over it; so low you can't under it, so wide you can't get around it.