A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 9, n. 12)
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A – February 13, 2011 *
“God’s Wisdom”
BIBLE READINGS
Sir 15:15-20 // I Cor 2:6-10 // Mt 5:17-37
(N.B. Series 9 of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY includes a prayerful study of the Sunday liturgy of Year A from the perspective of the Second Reading. For reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year C based on the Gospel reading, please scroll up to the “ARCHIVES” above and open Series 3. For reflections based on the Old Testament reading, open Series 6.)
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
This Sunday’s celebration of the Word is meant to help us follow through with our Christian vocation to be “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”. We need to be open to the wisdom of God. The gift of wisdom offered to us in Jesus Christ enables us to be what we are called to be – “salt” that flavors and challenges an insipid, feckless world and “light” that shines and witnesses to truth, especially amidst shadows of doubt and despair.
The Old Testament reading (Sir 15:15-20) tells us that the Lord’s wisdom and power are great. He is aware of everything a person does and cares for those who fear him. He gave us free will and we can choose good or evil – life and death. If we want to, we can keep the Lord’s commands. We can decide to be loyal to him or not. We can never blame God for our evil choices for which we are personally responsible and accountable. Indeed, the Lord God, whose wisdom is infinite, is beyond reproach. He is worthy of honor, thanksgiving and praise.
God’s immense wisdom is fully revealed in Jesus Christ. This Sunday’s Gospel reading (Mt 5:17-37) shows that the demands of him who is “divine wisdom incarnate” are exigent, radical and authoritative. Harold Buetow remarks: “The Gospel of Jesus Christ is wisdom – not the temporary mode of fads or fashion, but the way of eternal insight … [There is] nothing automatic about being a true Christian. And it entails facing our inner motivations, desires, and priorities, and holding them up to Jesus’ new standard of honesty and love.”
The Second Reading (I Cor 2:6-10) helps us to better identify true wisdom in order to better assimilate and live it. God’s wisdom is centered on Christ crucified, the Lord of glory. Mary Ehle comments: “Paul adds to the understanding of divine wisdom by contrasting it with earthly wisdom … The wisdom Paul preaches is not of this age: it does not belong to this or any historical time … Paul speaks instead of divine wisdom, which is mysterious and hidden. This wisdom God has made known since before the beginning of time … God’s wisdom has been made known through the Spirit. To those who are receptive, the Holy Spirit will reveal the wisdom of God’s plan of salvation in Christ. In last Sunday’s reading, Paul said that he did not come with wisdom, but he knew only Jesus Christ crucified. For Paul, this is the divine wisdom and power of God on which our faith rests … God’s wisdom is within their grasp if they open themselves to the Spirit.”
God’s wisdom challenges and gives strength to those who are spiritually mature as the following account in the life of Dorothy Day would show (cf. Robert Ellsberg, “Dorothy in Love” in AMERICA, November 15, 2010, p. 18-19).
The Long Loneliness [is] the memoir of Dorothy Day, the American-born co-founder of the Catholic Worker. There she introduces the story of her love affair with Forster Batterham, and the role he played in hastening her spirituality: “The man I loved, with whom I entered into a common-law marriage, was an anarchist, and Englishman by descent, and a biologist.” They met at a party in Greenwich Village in the early 1920s and soon thereafter began to live together – as she put it, “in the fullest sense of the phrase” – in a house on Staten Island.
Among their bohemian set there was nothing scandalous about such a relationship. It was evidently Dorothy who liked to think of it as a “common-law marriage”. For Forster, who never masked his scorn for the “institution of the family”, their relationship was simply a “comradeship”. Nevertheless, she loved him “in every way”. As she wrote: “I loved him for all he knew and pitied him for all he didn’t know. I loved him for the odds and ends I had to fish out of his sweater pockets and for the sand and shells he brought in with his fishing. I loved his lean cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.”
Wait a minute! Day is here describing, without any hint of Augustine’s obligatory shame or regret, her physical relationship with a man to whom she was not married. Needless to say, she was not yet a Catholic. Yet her point is to show how this lesson in love, this time of “natural happiness”, as she called it, awakened her thirst for an even greater happiness. She began to pray during her walks and started to attend Mass. This religious impulse was strengthened when she discovered she was pregnant – an event that inspired a sense of gratitude so large that only God could receive it. With that came the determination that she would have her child baptized, “come what may”.
As a dedicated anarchist, Forster would not be married by either church or state. And so to become Catholic, Dorothy recognized, would mean separating from the man she loved. “It got to the point where it was the simple question of whether to choose God or man.” Ultimately, painfully, she chose God. In December 1927 she forced Forster to leave the house. That month she was received into the church. (…)
In editing Day’s personal letters, All the Way to Heaven, I was astonished to read an extraordinary collection of letters to Forster dating from 1925, soon after their first meeting, until December 1932, the eve of her new life in the Catholic Worker. (…)
By the fall of 1932 Dorothy was living in New York. In December she traveled to Washington, D.C., to cover the Hunger March of the Unemployed. There on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, she offered a prayer that God would show her some way to combine her Catholic faith and her commitment to social justice. Immediately afterward she would meet Peter Maurin, the French peasant philosopher who would inspire her to launch the Catholic Worker and whose ideas would dominate the rest of her life. Whether there was any relation between the opening of this new door and the decision finally to close the door on her hope of marrying Forster, Dorothy’s letter to him of December 10 would be her last for many years.
After describing her strong commitment to the prohibition of sex outside of marriage, she writes: “The ache in my heart is intolerable at times, and sometimes for days I can feel your lips upon me, waking and sleeping. It is because I love you so much that I want you to marry me.” Nevertheless, she concluded: “It all is hopeless of course, though it has often seemed to me a simple thing. Imaginatively I can understand your hatred and rebellion against my beliefs and I can’t blame you. I have really given up hope now, so I won’t try to persuade you anymore.”
But even this did not mark the end of their relationship. Over the years they remained connected through Tamar. There would be friendly notes, the exchange of gifts and visits in the hospital. In Dorothy’s final years Forster took to calling every day. He was present at her funeral in 1980, and later at a memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
So what, in the end, do these newly published letters reveal? They certainly confirm the deep, passionate love described in Dorothy’s memoir, thus underscoring the incredible sacrifice she endured for the sake of her faith. That sacrifice lay at the heart of her vocation; it was the foundation for a lifetime of courage, perseverance and dedication. It marked her deep sense of the heroic demands of faith. (…) Dorothy considered her love for Forster to be one of the primary encounters with grace in her life, one for which she never ceased to rejoice. That insight and that witness are among her many gifts.
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Do we allow ourselves to ponder and be touched and overwhelmed by the power and immense wisdom of our loving God?
Do we have the courage and humility to stand and be confronted by Jesus’ new standard of honesty and love?
Do we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit who reveals to us the depths of God’s wisdom fulfilled, concretized and radically revealed in Jesus crucified?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Loving God,
we adore your infinite love and immense wisdom.
Thank you for the fullness of wisdom
revealed in the paschal mystery of your Son Jesus Christ.
He was crucified and glorified
to show the fullness of your saving love.
Give us the courage to respond to that love.
Help us to embrace
Jesus’ new standard of honesty and integrity.
Let our daily actions and inmost desires
be challenged and inspired by his life-giving sacrifice.
Teach us to be open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit
who inspires us to embrace the folly of the cross
and discern in it the wisdom that saves.
In Jesus Christ, wisdom made perfect,
we choose life over death;
we commit ourselves to do good and detest evil.
You love us with an everlasting love.
We love and serve you
for you are wise and powerful.
We praise and glorify you,
now and forever.
Assembly: Amen.
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“We speak a wisdom to those who are mature … we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory.” (cf. I Cor 2:6-7)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Pray that we may be filled with God’s wisdom and that it will inspire all our thoughts, actions and deeds. By our daily choices to do good to the people around us, especially the poor and needy, and by resisting the abusive manipulation and destructive influence of the mass media, let the modern world experience the benevolence of divine wisdom.
ACTION PLAN: That we may experience deeply the immense power of God’s wisdom, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR: A Weekly Pastoral Tool (Year A, vol. 7, # 12).
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
60 Sunset Ave., Staten Island, NY 10314
Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US