UNDERSTANDING
INTRODUCTION
The title of my homily for this 4th Saturday in Ordinary Time is, “Understanding.”
It’s the obvious theme to think about and to pray for –
as it appears in the story about Solomon in today’s first reading.
Understanding ….
THE STORY
Solomon, the young son of David, goes to a place called
Gibeon – a high place – and high places were where people liked to climb to –
in order to get closer to God.
On an altar there Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings.
A question: who lugged all those offerings and the wood
for the fires – up that mountain?
A question for you:
have you ever climbed a mountain and felt the presence of God in a high
place?
Colorado? New
Hampshire? The Alps? Top of the Empire State Building? The World Trade Center
towers – before they fell?
If you’ve done that – and a high place triggered some awe
filled moments - you had a glimpse of
what the author of the first reading is triggering.
After all that smoke and offerings, God appears to Solomon in a dream and says,
“Whatever you want, you got it.”
Solomon realizing he’s young and inexperienced – and he’s
now in charge of the kingdom – he asks
God for the gift of understanding.
Great story – about what a leader needs - it’s understanding.
NEXT QUESTION
What’s your take on what understanding is?
It’s different than knowledge – like 2 plus 2 is four.
That’s knowledge. Like water is
made up of H2O. That’s information. Understanding is not information. How to be a
good leader? There are formulas and recommendations and anecdotes, but it’s
still has a lot of the subjective in it.
So, a person can have the gift of understanding – and
have a 4th grade education or a person with a PH. D. from Cornell
can be as dumb as cardboard.
People sometimes ask me to recommend a priest or a
therapist and I say - ask around. I also found out what people really want when
it comes to getting a car fixed – a good mechanic – but when it comes to
relationship and family and marriage stuff, whom to talk to: people want a
person who listens and hopefully
understands a bit of what to say and suggest.
HIGH SCHOOL
RETREATS
I’ve been at a lot of high school retreats and part of
that is small group work and it’s always nice to hear a kid say, “My dad. He
understands.” “My mom. She understands.” “My Spanish teacher. What a gift. She has two
teenage daughters and she understands kids.”
HOW TO BECOME AN UNDERSTANDING PERSON?
Listen. Cry. Wear their moccasins. Give others your time. Understanding
people say, “Let me think about this.” They say,
“I’m not too sure about this, so I’d recommend you talk to Gloria who is
a great counselor.”
MAGAZINE ARTICLE
To me, I should end this homily right here, but I just
happened to pick up a copy of Commonweal two days ago: the May 3, 2019
issue.
If I haven’t read an issue of a magazine, the year and
the date doesn’t make any difference. I picked up this issue because it had
listed on the cover an article “On
Raymond Carver” – and I liked his short stories.
Anyway, after reading about Raymond Carver, I spotted an
interview with Carolyn Forche about her and about her Memoir – and I love
memoirs. It described her experience
living in Central America. Surprise she experiences
understanding.
She’s asked by the interviewer: “How did your experience in El Salvador affect your personal faith or your
spirituality?”
Carolyn Forche answers: “You know, that’s a really
interesting
question because I went to Catholic school for twelve years as a child
and I was taught by Dominicans, and after my formal schooling in a Catholic
school ended, I went out into a secular university and out into life, and it
was during the time of the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement. I drifted away from practicing
Catholicism. It wasn’t that I was no longer
spiritual, but I didn’t practice Catholicism and had that sort of questioning attitude that
all high-school students develop. And
then I find myself in El Salvador and suddenly there’s the popular church, and
people having Masses on boulders in the middle of the countryside, and I’m
meeting these wonderful priests who are deeply committed to the poor and the
wonderful nuns also deeply committed to the poor, and I’m introduced to the
principles of the theology of liberation.
“And then there is of course Msgr. Romero at the heart of
everything. He is the one voice in the country that has any institutional power
that is speaking back to this barbarity and this butchery. And you know, despite what it eventually
might cost him, he was brave. They were
all brave, these nuns and priests. I saw
faith practiced in a living way. In a
way that I think Christ would have
approved of. I had never been in a community like that. I had never met Catholics like that. And I’m
not saying that the whole church was that way because of course there was still
the old, established, hierarchical, conservative church in El Salvador, but the
vibrancy of the popular church was not to be denied.
[Now here comes the paragraph that has the word
understanding in it. It also has a sentence and an image that are great.]
“So, I tiptoed back into Catholicism through this. I said, ‘I’ not a good Catholic,’ and Msgr.
Romero gave me Communion anyway. Nobody
cared if I wasn’t a good Catholic.
Nobody asked me when the last time I went to confession was, because I’d
have to be truthful; it had been years.
I found myself surrounded by
these wonderful souls who had all accepted the preferential option for the
poor, which is of course the understanding that if you are going to put
yourself at the service of the poor, you must also accept their fate. You have to be fully with them, including in
their manner of death.
CONCLUSION
A bit long – but I hope that triggers some thoughts about
understanding.
Christopher Fry in his story The Boy With a Cart,
1925, wrote,
Between
Our birth and death we may touch understanding
As a moth brushes a window with its wing.
May you have touched understanding people and an
understanding God – and you are an understanding person.
