LOVE IS IN THE ORDINARY
Author: Fr. Michael Byron July 21, 2019
This past
week I attended an excellent performance of the Bob Fosse Musical titled
“Pippin” at a local theater. I enjoy
that show mostly for the music, but the story line has something important to
communicate also. The title character,
Pippin, is a young man, coming of age, who is convinced that he is destined to
make something epic and enduring with his life, something grandiose and
spectacularly impressive. He is the son
of King Charlemagne in 9th Century France, and he is determined to become as glorious as his father, whose
name is literally in English “Charles the Great.”
He first
thinks that he can do it by becoming the mightier warrior who has ever lived—until
the day that he kills an enemy soldier and he realizes what an empty dream that
is. He quits the royal army. Then he pursues a life of hedonistic
pleasures, spending his charm on women and temporal gratifications—until the
day that he discovers that all of it ends up in grief. Then he decides to kill his father so that he
can be the king, wielding all power over his subjects—until he finds out on his
first day on the job that he is incompetent. Eventually, after becoming a homeless nomad, he is given pity and
hospitality by a widow and her young son, who take him into their home and give
him a job working their farmland and tending their estate.
But for
Pippin that work and those relationships are too ordinary. He is certain that his destiny is something
much greater, and so he leaves them—even though they have come to love and
appreciate him, and are crushed by his departure.
Pippin has
no idea what he’s supposed to be and do, but surely it can’t be this. There has to be something more to life than
mere love. Right?
But in the
end, after hitting rock bottom again, he discovers that there is nothing “mere”
about human love, even when it can look pretty unexceptional as it is lived out
day-by-day. Pippin returns to the two who
have opened their hearts to him, and in good old Broadway fashion basks in the
life of a lesson well-learned.
The plot of
the play is kind of formulaic in that regard. It seems a bit “tidy” in the end. But it’s still true.
It is true
because the most primal life force in the world—love—usually comes disguised in
some of the most ordinary circumstances of life. Like in families and friendships, like in
welcoming strangers and caring for the weak, like in engaging in the most
unremarkable acts of charity and justice for our neighbors. Like in de-centering ourselves and our
personal ambitions for the sake of making sure that a whole community can
thrive.
Love is
usually not worked out in the halls of celebrity or politics or business or
media. In fact it is often most
conspicuously absent there. That’s just
the truth. Real love is not normally
glamourous. But it is very biblical.
In today’s 1st reading (Genesis) we hear of the welcome by Abraham to three complete
strangers—at least one of whom was, we are told, the Lord in disguise. They were in a place where nobody was there
to notice. There were no signs and
wonders. Just three travelers who were
begged to stay and to accept hospitality. Love.
And two of
the three hosts—Sarah inside the tent and the unknown servant who prepared the
lavish beef dinner—are never even seen by the guests. There is nothing glamourous or conspicuous
about their acting out of their ordinary loving commitment to be dedicated to
the ones without a place to stay.
And in the
end we learn that there is a divine weight, a heavenly importance to something
so seemingly ordinary. Abraham is
promised that his wife Sarah (who is still invisible and silent in this story)
will have a child within a year—she who is already very old and previously
unable to become pregnant. This all
happens outside a tent, far from any gathered crowd to applaud and to be
amazed. There is nothing “mere” about
acts of love, acts of welcome that occur behind the spotlight of popular
approval.
In fact, as we hear elsewhere
in the gospels, it is when religious behavior starts to be done for public
spectacle that we ought to become most suspicious of it. Love is at the heart of life, and love is
most often embedded in people and events and relationships that look very, very
unexceptional. Pippin has something to
teach us.
Today’s
gospel of Luke is something of a mirror image of that story of Abraham and the
traveling strangers. Abraham’s service
was the very ordinary human way through which God come to be known among his
family. Hospitality and work is the only
way in which the divine comes to be present among us.
Yet it is
also true that hospitality and work, in and of themselves, without reference to
Jesus Christ, are just that—hospitality and work. Not bad things, but not moments through which
to meet God, and to realize our own ultimate happiness.
And that’s
really the point of this gospel of Martha and Mary. It is interesting to notice that here too
there is no indication in the story that Jesus had ever met these sisters
before—he was just passing through a foreign town, and they reached out to
welcome him in to their home.
One of these
sisters—Martha—imagined the task to be nothing other than hospitality for its
own sake…certainly a good and virtuous thing in itself, but missing the more
important part. It was Mary who
understood that in this ordinary act of hospitality, of everyday love, we are
brought face to face with Christ. Pippin
has something to teach us. Our ultimate
fulfillment as human beings (what we Christians call “salvation”) comes through
plain old ordinary love, day by day by often ordinary-looking day. In faithful commitments to spouses, families, friendships, church, neighbors, the poor and suffering. That’s where we meet him. And, oh
yes, at Eucharist. In ordinary looking
bread and wine and blessing and gathering and singing and praying. Pippin can teach us too, right there
alongside Jesus.
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