Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 368

Did I make a mistake when I humbled myself so that you might be exalted,

because I preached the Gospel of God to you without charge?

I plundered other churches by accepting from them

in order to minister to you.

And when I was with you and in need, I did not burden anyone,

for the brothers who came from Macedonia

supplied my needs.

Scripture scholars have discussed into the wee hours of the night the "letter of tears," which Saint Paul mentions in 2 Corinthians 2:

For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not that you might be pained but that you might know the abundant love I have for you.

Neither the First nor Second letter to the Corinthians entirely fits that description. Was the letter lost? That would be no surprise. But the best theory suggest that 2 Corinthians is a compilation of several letters; and that parts of the "letter of tears" is here.

Today's first reading is surely from that unhappy epistle. The Apostle probably wrote from jail, as he often did, with time on his hands. He had heard sad news about his beloved congregation in Corinth and wrote to them in a fever of distress. There were factions and quarrels among them! He sometimes imagined himself as a father or mother of the churches he founded, and he didn't hesitate to take a parental, pleading tone of shaming and guilt with his people. If this is not his best moment, it may be his most human, in the sense that he is overcome with anguish. Words, unrestrained and unedited, poured out of his tormented heart.

I am not a parent but I often listen to anguished parents, and I occasionally read of parental anxiety. Since the onset of the Freudian Age, adult children have blamed their parents for what happened twenty, thirty and fifty years ago. This angry expression of ancient grief sometimes helps adults come to terms with their own shortcomings; it might even help them forgive and be reconciled with the past.

But, in the meanwhile, young parents agonize over the possibility their children might be traumatized by something they said or did or failed to do. Worse, they find themselves in that most intensely intimate place -- the family -- unable to constrain and control all of their human impulses. Regrettable words are spoken; unfortunate actions happen, unconstrained passions overcome good intentions. Children who should be granted the privilege of emotional meltdowns, witness their parents spiral out of control.

In fact, the young parents are still growing up; still learning how to make sense of adult life with its unexpected demands and exhausting complexity. And children remember everything. Or seem to. Including things they will understand only a half-century later.

It's good to read passages like today's from Second Corinthians and realize the Church received Saint Paul's letter of tears and treasured it. Perhaps not as well as we would wish, but it wasn't entirely lost.

We don't wish he had never written these awful passages. We understand that the best people and holiest saints suffer the same anguish as the rest of us. Family life and church life often resemble politics, which is said to resemble sausage-making. It ain't pretty but the results are divine.