St. Patrick’s Day fell
on a Friday this year. Thus, several Illinois bishops (though not all) and
other bishops elsewhere “granted a dispensation” so that the faithful could
thereby have corned beef on the feast. (Is there any evidence that workaday
Catholics are incapable of making such decisions on their own? I met no such
person during my evening out.)
By way of two bishops, here is an alternative to fretting about shamrocks and dispensations. Pope Francis suggests we read On Naboth by St. Ambrose (340-397), bishop of Milan. It is a 32-page commentary on a parable recounted in First Kings 21. St. Ambrose invites us to consider fasting in a more substantial manner than foregoing meat on seven days each spring—only six days if St. Patrick or St. Joseph intercedes.
St.
Ambrose does not have to search far in Scripture to conclude that God is not
interested in superficial fasting. “The fast that I have chosen,” as St.
Ambrose paraphrases God, is to “undo every tie of injustice, loose the bonds of
contracts made under duress, set free the broken and break every unjust
obligation. Break your bread for the hungry and bring the needy and homeless
into your house.”
St.
Ambrose continues with a saying that is often reprinted: “Nature, then, knows
no distinction when we are born, and it knows none when we die. It creates all
alike, and all alike it encloses in the bowels of the tomb.” Go to any cemetery.
“Open up the earth and [see] if you are able [to] discern who is rich. Then
clear away the rubbish and [see] if you [can] recognize the poor person.”
As
for the Old Testament story in First
Kings, St. Ambrose cuts no slack for King Ahab, who perhaps had an advance
copy of The Art of the Deal. Ahab
seems to offer Naboth a deal for his vineyard. I’ll give you either a different
vineyard or cash, says Ahab.
St.
Ambrose is not fooled. It is arrogance, writes St. Ambrose. Give me, Ahab
says. For what purpose? “All this madness, all this uproar, then, was in order
to find space for paltry herbs. It is not, therefore, that you [Ahab] desire
to possess something useful for yourself so much as it is that you want to
exclude others... The rich man cries out that he does not have.”
The
First Kings story, St. Ambrose concludes,
“is repeated everyday” as we in our dissatisfaction covet other people’s goods.
It is not too late to adopt a Lent discipline.
We can try to fast from envy and greed. We can try to be rich in contentment;
not only between now and April 16, 2017. But we can practice contentment every
day until that day when our last mortal possession is taken to a cemetery to
join all the other look-a-likes.
It
wouldn’t hurt these Lent days and in the coming months to also give something
away. Here St. Ambrose has a final piece of advice. “You are commonly in the
habit of saying: We ought not to give to someone whom God has cursed by
desiring him to be poor.” Or as this is expressed in the United States: We
should refrain from helping the undeserving poor. There are no cursed poor, St.
Ambrose concludes. There is no divine distinction between the deserving and
undeserving. Read the Scripture: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.”
Droel edits INITIATIVES
(PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a printed newsletter.
No comments:
Post a Comment