Reading Francis

Here’s what jumped out at me from the readings from yesterday’s Mass: encountering God is a lot more like a football game than a book group.

One of the things that I struggle with is the degree to which many Christians talk about their faith in dispassionate, philosophical terms. In Catholicism, there’s a tendency to elevate the Ancient Greek philosophers to such a degree that I sometimes wonder if there’s a “St. Epictetus” or “St. Aristotle” statue hiding in the Vatican somewhere. Among mainline Protestants, the devotion to the Greeks may not be as strong, but there’s often a post-Enlightenment approach to religious experience that can work so hard to show that faith and reason aren’t opposites that it can intellectualize the emotion right out of the encounter with divinity. While the voices of faith that come either from beyond Western Europe, from its marginalized communities, or from more charismatic traditions may not suffer the same desiccation, many Christian circles in the dominant culture sound a lot more like book groups than fan zones. Today’s readings speak to a different side of faith.

Listen to Jeremiah 20:7-9

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;

You were too strong for me, and you triumphed…

I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more.

But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; 

I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

Or Psalm 62

My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God….

For you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water….

You are my help, and in the shadow of your wings I should for joy. 

My soul clings fast to you; your right hand upholds me.

Or Romans 12:1-2 (one of my favorites)

I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice…

Or Matthew 16, where Jesus predicts his Passion, Peter tells him “ix-nay on the uffering-say”, and Jesus compares him to Satan, before explaining

Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

I have been guilty of reading through these while going through the motions, without reflecting on the passion in each of them. I don’t think I’m alone in this.  There is a setting of Psalm 62 that somehow turns “My soul is thirsting for you O Lord” into a harmless little ditty you can kind of hum along to. If you know it, it is probably stuck in your head right now. Sorry.

No, really. I am sorry. Because the words of the Psalmist and of Jeremiah and Paul and Matthew’s Jesus, when you really notice them, don’t lend themselves to pleasant settings. They speak to a level of emotion, a level of passion, that belongs to genres other than hymns – driving beats or fierce instrumentals or raw vocals. 

My point is not to critique music, though. It’s to ask whether by silencing the longing, hunger and thirst of those who have encountered God directly and are willing to sacrifice themselves totally as a result of that encounter, we’ve buried the element of faith that speaks most directly to the human heart.

It’s week one of college football, and the NFL kicks off next week. I let myself be duped, too…when I think my team is better than it turns out to be. The fire burning in my heart usually has more to do with getting a defensive stop than anything holy. I don’t offer my body as a living sacrifice, but I cheer for those who do (and I know some of y’all still will go at least as far as to apply some face paint before a game). That we are more passionate about our teams than we are about our God isn’t football’s fault. It’s ours.