Today’s readings: Ecclesiasticus 35, 12-14.16-19; 2 Timothy 4, 6-8.16-18; Luke 18, 9-14.
The Pharisee and the tax collector in today’s parable set the scene for us to revisit different ways of understanding how religion can block or unblock our access to the God we believe in. They stand for categories of people and of thought still mainstream in our way of envisaging Christian life.
At times it’s hard to look someone in the face. We prefer talking to someone while walking or watching TV or being busy doing something that can at least distract us from meeting the eye. It happens in all types of relationships and it happens also in that aspect of life we call spiritual.
Yet spirituality, to be true to its name, is meant, above all, to strip you naked before God and your own self. Otherwise it’s no spirituality at all. The more spirituality is truthful the more it makes us connect with our own self in depth. The more faith keeps us in denial of the truth about ourself, the more it is false, and distorting of faith itself.
These are the two contrasting ways of being with God that the gospel personifies in the Pharisee and the tax collector. One is wrapped up in his own self and is only capable of speaking to himself and about himself. The other, in all honesty, could connect with God and be touched by his mercy.
When you pray, as Jesus himself suggests, it is not what you say or how much you say that matters. What matters mostly is from where you pray, whether you pray from your secret place inside.
The gift of God’s life in us can so quickly be seized as a possession and everything then turns into self-accomplishment. That is what the Pharisee in the temple stands for. In contrast, the tax collector presents himself empty-handed in God’s presence and hence more in a position to accept the gift. The humble man’s prayer pierces the clouds, we read in the first reading.
In our times, spirituality may easily be seen as embodying the privatisation of religion in the modern West. It has become big business. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote a book, titled Selling Spirituality, to show how this can be a modern fallacy. Spirituality, they write, is not meant in the first place to soothe away the angst of modern living. Perhaps that also, but it takes more than that.
In the wake of the critique of religion and of its institutions, a major challenge for believers is how to speak or not to speak of God. Culturally, we are in a post-Christian era. We struggle to find adequate ways of publicly speaking of the divine or even of the sacred. Not to mention that on matters we consider vital for society we are on radically different wavelengths. A case in point is the present debate, or lack of it, on same-sex unions.
Many find refuge in a fundamentalist way of reading reality, seeking first and foremost to retrieve the past and resist change. This can be suicidal for the faith. Perhaps the key to find new ways of evangelisation is the return to the inner life. Today we have less and less cultural foundations out there, and what we need to pursue most is not stability in our fluid culture but stability inside.
It is in our personal journeys of growth that we need to recover new points of reference. If in contrast with what shaped our lives in the recent past so much seems to be collapsing, it is in the midst of these ruins that we are called to reconnect with the God who transcends culture, gender, race, and even religion.
The God of Jesus Christ was different from the God of the Pharisees and may be very different from the God depicted in our theologies and catechisms throughout the ages when we often depicted God as without a human face. And we still do it.
The Church does not exist to preach forgiveness and reconciliation but to be the space where these can be possible. The only criterion of true religion is the extent to which in our collective journeys and in society in general it serves to accentuate or to transcend the separation between insiders and outsiders.