WE ARE NOT IN CONTROL
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
August 04, 2019
One summer
when I was in the seminary I lived at a parish in NE Minneapolis with a pastor
who was in charge of the Worship Office of the Archdiocese. Among other things his job meant that he was
responsible for organizing and executing funeral Masses when priests died. He’d figure out how to arrange for the bishop
to be there, who should have what roles in the liturgy, how the music would go,
etc.
And it was
also true then—as it still is—that priests are supposed to have all of their
preferences for their funerals written down and recorded in the office of the
Chancery of the Archdiocese so that people don’t have to guess about things
when the time comes. So one day an elder
priest died that summer—a man I never met. His instructions for his funeral had been very clear and detailed. He was a very old-school kind of pastor, and
so his wishes were that nobody other than the archbishop was to be vested for
the Mass, it was to be conducted in Latin, and the presider was to be clad in
all black vestments, the way it used to be.
So the
pastor with whom I was living went off to the funeral to supervise
everything. And late in the day he
returned to the house with a quiet smile and a word of advice for me. He said, “You ought to be aware of how much
control you have over how your funeral Mass is celebrated when the Archbishop
is there. It is something roughly
approaching zero.” There had been no
Latin, no black vestments, and lots of vested priest in the sanctuary. That deceased pastor had radically
miscalculated his ability to orchestrate things from the grave when the bishop
preferred something else. We might say
that, borrowing language from today’s 1st Reading, all that funeral
planning had been so much “vanity”—kind of a waste of time, or a delusion.
Now in
general, pre-planning your funeral is usually a very good and helpful thing to
do, and usually people’s wishes are, in fact, honored. But I think that memory can serve as a good
illustration of how easy it can be for us to imagine, falsely, the control we
think we have over our lives—not only when they are over, but each and every
day…now.
The people
among us who understand that most clearly are the ones who have suffered the
most, with illness and the loss of loved ones and dashed dreams. They are our sacred wisdom figures whose
voices need most to be honored in discussions about God. I am not one of those voices.
But a person
named Qoheleth is; he who is the author of our 1st Reading today—the
Book of Ecclesiastes. At first hearing
this can seem a very depressing and despairing bit of scripture: “All is
vanity! What use or good comes from all
our life’s labors? In the end, we all
die and nothing seems to have mattered very much.”
But in the
end, that is not Qoheleth’s message at all. Because what is gained through it all is holy wisdom—the recognition of
what is truly of lasting value in life, as distinct from what merely seems to
be of value. What is truly “vanity” is
this false idea that we are the manipulators of our own success and salvation,
either in this life or the next. What is
“vanity” is the lie that we are ever in ultimate control of our destiny. We’re not!
Perhaps that
seems a difficult message to take in, but for people of faith—especially people
of faith who know what it is to suffer—it’s the best news of all. Absolutely everything that is merely of this
world will ultimately fail us as the source of our lasting hope: our property, our
reputation, our friends and family, our health, our pleasures, our cleverness
and charm…
…and oh yes,
Jesus reminds us in the gospel today, our money. Jesus understood then as well as now that
there is no more toxic seductive, lethal falsehood among us than the idea that
money will fix everything at the end of the day. Again, it is the sufferers among us who
understand the truth of that most clearly.
Jesus had a
parable to share with his audience about that, a story concerning a man who
happened to be wealthy. But that was not
his sin. Jesus did not come along to
condemn the rich. What he did call
sinful, however, was that perverse belief that money puts us or anybody else in
control of our life’s destiny. He never
said that “money is the root of all evil.” He said that “love of money is the root of all evil,” as in displacing
the trust and faith that is owed to God alone with a bogus and dangerous and
ultimately tragic false hope in something that is merely of our own
making. The good things of this earth
are, in fact, really good. And the
purpose of the Christian life is not to hate or reject any of those
things. That’s not what St. Paul means
when he tells the Colossians to make a distinction between the things of earth
and the things of God. This earth is of
God, together with all its goods and blessings, and yes, even money. But nothing of earth is God, and so none of
it is deserving of our ultimate trust in the way that only God is worthy.
That rich
man in Jesus’ parable today wasn’t called a “fool” for being wealthy. To the contrary, his good business sense
seems to have reaped great rewards. No,
he became the fool when he began to believe that his riches would save
him. In his inner monologue there is not
any reference to God—only to himself, and to all his “stuff.” Jesus is talking about enduring life, and the
rich man is talking about barn storage capacity. That man wasn’t in control of his future, and
he never was. He only thought he
was. There’s the tragedy.
We’re not in
control either, and that doesn’t have to frighten or depress us. In fact, we can count it a supreme
blessing. Let the sufferers among us
show us how.
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