It can make me feel self-conscious, in a way that is not good. It seems I am always saying the same thing, over and over. And I don’t mean “The Lord be with you”, or “In the name of the Father, and of the Son…”. I mean when I talk. When I preach, when I write, when I answer questions; all the things I say that I am responsible for crafting, all of it seems to be the same.Here's lookin' at you, kid.
As we launch into Year A (Saint Matthew’s Gospel) of the Sunday lectionary cycle, I look to speak to these Scriptures for the seventh time since I arrived here as Pastor. You’ve heard it all before! The parables, the psalms, the glitches in grammar and the grandeur of the whole. Do you come hoping for something new, something different? My self-consciousness makes me want not to repeat, not to recycle a homily or a phrase or an image I have given you already. But really, who remembers what I said in 2013? I will tell you who does: I do! And I hate to repeat myself; it seems so – unoriginal!
When I was in seminary there was a spiritual director, a Jesuit from Massachusetts, who asserted to us aspiring preachers that “You only have one homily.” No matter how many times you preach, under what circumstances and on what scriptures, what examples you give or what stories you tell, you really only preach one thing. He did not mean that we preach only and always the mystery of salvation in Christ, though that is something we should do. He was telling us that every minister of the Gospel has a “thing” which he hammers over and over throughout his ministry. The concept was both amusing and frightening.
What Fr. D. was trying to tell us, I think, was that we each have our vision of the mystery of salvation in Christ, constrained by our human limitedness rather than by any shortfall in the truth. Like the three blind men encountering the elephant, we all come at it in a particular way, lacking the faculty to grasp the whole. One may emphasize the trunk while another can only talk about the leg. Both are, in truth, conveying elephantine reality.
We are accustomed to seek what is new and different. The so-called “news” is presented as something we never encountered before and did not expect. But after the initial frisson of excitement that novelty elicits, we lapse into ennui. Current events and pointed opinions presented as “news” gets us only so far.
What should excite us as well as console us, not to mention shape and direct our every action and aspiration, is that God loves us and wants us to be happy. He loves us so much, in fact, that he took human flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory; the glory of a father’s only begotten son. And that glory is laid out in spectacular fashion in his suffering like us, with us, and for us. We have heard it all before, but it is the only news that is genuinely good.
I have only so much creativity. I read books, I read articles, I listen to music and immerse myself in art; I go for hikes to ‘bathe’ in the forest. Every day brings something. I pay attention – some would suggest too much attention – to distinction and difference and nuance. So much variety! My “takeaway”, the result, my conclusions are over and over again the same: how many thousands upon thousands of ways we people can get things wrong, and how unique and universal is the one thing that is right.
As is the case in the elements of our ritual, where repetition and familiarity are both good and necessary for the experience and the expression, even the aspects of our worship that are the least programmatic, the least scripted – the parts I have to devise and provide – even these have an underlying sameness, rooted in the consistency of my limitations and the constancy of the universal truth of God in Christ.
Saint John Paul II said that Jesus Christ is the answer to every human question. I have yet to find the exception. That would mean that saying the same thing over and over, in different words and stories and situations, is actually the best remedy for being self-conscious.
Monsignor Smith
