Margaret Culkin
Banning, “Living With Regrets,”Readers Digest, October 1958
COMMANDMENTS
OF THE HEART
OPENING IMAGE
In Mikhail Sholokhov’s classic
novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, a group of young Cossack soldiers on the
way to war stayed overnight in an old man’s house.
While they were having their last
smoke before going to sleep, the old man, who had served in the Turkish war,
asked them, “So you’re off to war, soldiers?”
When they answered, “Yes,
grand-dad, off to war,”he said,“It won’t be anything like the Turkish war
was, I don’t suppose. They’ve got different weapons now.”
One of the Cossacks, named
Tomilin, barked back, “It’ll be just the same. Just as devilish. Just as they
killed the Turks off then, so we’ll have to now.” He sounded angry, butno one knew with whom.
The old man began to preach, “My
sons, I ask you one thing. I ask you seriously, and you mark what I say.
Remember one thing! If you want to come back from the mortal struggle alive and
with a whole skin, you must keep the law of humanity.”
Stephan, another of the young
Cossack soldiers, asked with a smile, “Which one?”
The old man blurted out, “This
one: don’t take other men’s goods. That’s one. As you fear God, don’t do wrong
to any woman. That’s the second. And then you must know certain prayers.”
The Cossacks sat up, and all
spoke at once:
“If only we didn’t have to lose
our own goods - not to speak of taking other people’s!” “And why mustn’t we
touch a woman? How are we to stand that?”
The old man answered right back,
“You must not touch a woman. Never. If you can’t stand that, you’ll lose your
heads or you’ll be wounded. You’ll be sorry after, but then it will be too
late. I’ll tell you the prayers. I went right through the Turkish war, death on
my shoulders like a saddlebag, but I came through alive because of these
prayers.”
Then the old man went into
another room, “rummaged beneath an ikon, and brought back a crumbling, faded
brown piece of paper.”
“Get up and write them down!” he
commanded. “You’ll be off again before dawn tomorrow, won’t you?”
And all the Cossacks, but one,
slowly got up, wrote down the prayers and tucked them inside with the crosses
they wore around their necks. And they left for war the next morning!
HOMILETIC REFLECTIONS
The old man in that story by
Mikhail Sholokhov is like Moses in today’s first reading. He delivers for God a
list of commandments that are meant to protect and help other people as well as
myself.
The old man in that story by
Mikhail Sholokhov is also like Jesus in today’s gospel. He is not afraid to
tell it as it is.
Anyone reading the Old and New
Testament knows that people need commandments. Anyone reading Sholokhov’s
novels or most novels or the daily newspaper, knows that people need
commandments. Do you think we need commandments?
People have strange gods. People
worship weird things. People curse god and others. People are workaholics -
never resting to enjoy Sunday as well as the gifts around them. People forget
God. People forget or neglect their parents. People kill. People commit
adultery. People steal. People tell lies about their neighbor. People idolize
and wish they had their neighbors wife, or husband, their swimming pool, their
$30,000 dollar plus car and their vacations.
The result is a ruined and
divided heart. Breaking commandments lead to broken hearts. Our core, our
center, is ruined if God and concern for others are not allowed presence there.
The human heart is the place where God wants to dwell, where God wants his
temple. The human heart is a temple and we can really mess it up, when we fill
it with all kinds of strange gods, idols, ideas, and desires.
Today’s Gospel is an invitation
to ask Jesus to come into our heart, into our temple and to clear out the sheep
and the oxen and to toss out the money changers.
Today’s Gospel ends with the
words that indicate very clearly that Jesus knows the motivations of the human
heart. He knows what makes people tick. “He needed no one to give him testimony
about human nature. He was well aware of what was in the human heart.”
Today’s Gospel is an invitation
to listen to Jesus’ warning, “Stop turning my Father’s house into a
marketplace!”
Today’s readings then are one
more Lenten call for conversion of heart. And as we know, conversion of heart
means dying - a dying to self. St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading,
that the message of the cross is crazy and foolish. It’s absurd to let go of
all thoseresentments and hurts that
fill our heart. Disarmament is dangerous. The message of the cross is a
stumbling block. It always sounds absurd, that is, till we see the long range
results of our present patterns of behavior. The message of the cross always
sounds crazy, that is, till we look through Good Friday to Easter Sunday, when
we begin to see the possibility of resurrection and new life on the other side
of our present death, when we see a cleansed temple on the other side of our
present messy one.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
To be practical, I would suggest
taking some time out for Lenten prayer and reflection on the following three
questions that come out of today’s three readings:
1)
What’s going on inside our heart?
2)
What are the commandments of our heart?
3) Do I see the
wisdom of the cross or does it still seem foolishor absurd?
First question: What’s
going on inside my heart?
When Jesus walked into the temple
to pray, he walked into a temple whose god had become the god-almighty dollar.
He walked into a temple that had become a marketplace for animals. He saw a lot
of things that were not helping it to be a house of prayer.
Lent is a great time to have a
heart examination. Allow Jesus the healer to come into your heart and look
around. Jesus found money changers and animals for sacrifice in the temple in
Jerusalem. What would he find in our heart, our inner temple today? What beasts
within us need to be sacrificed?
Name the beasts! Lent is a good
time to make a moral and spiritual inventory. What’s biting or bugging me?
What’s barking inside of me? Am I an alligator, always causing fear by attacking
people? What do I pig out on?Am I a
bear of a bull to live with? Am I a pest? What animal is on my high altar?
Whatpet resentments do I keep on
feeding? What place does money play in my life? What are my sins?
To answer those questions is to
name our beasts. To answer those questions is to make a moral and spiritual
inventory. Lent is a good time to do just that.
Second Question:What are the commandments ofmy heart?
In prayer, we see not only the
beasts that roam our heart, we can also hear God’s commandments of the
heart.
In 1927 in his essay on “The
Future of An Illusion,” Freud asked, “In what does the peculiar value of
religious ideas lie?” Then he asks his readers to reflect on what would happen
if people just went by instinct. “If one imagines its prohibitions lifted - if,
then, one may take any woman one pleases as a sexual object, if one may without
hesitation kill one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in the way,
if, too, one can carry off any of the other man’s belongings without asking
leave how splendid, what a string of satisfactions one’s life would be! True,
one soon comes across the first difficulty: everyone else has exactly the same
wishes as I have and will treat me with no more consideration than I treat him.”
Sound familiar? It’s the same
message that the old man gave the young soldiers in the opening story of this
homily. Sound familiar? It’s the golden rule. Sound familiar? It’s Jesus
command to love one another as we love ourselves. In prayerwe can realize this. Isn’t that one good
reason why we need churches and temples? Don’t we need places on the planet
where people can hear that they are not the only personon the planet?
Third Question: Do I see the
wisdom of the cross or does it still seem foolish or absurd?
To name our beasts and to keep
God’s commandments is a dying to self. To many people to do that is absurd.
Moreover to realize that I can’t change by my own power, but only with the help
of God, is also absurd for many people. Yet, if I look at my life in prayer
while sitting in a cleansed temple and empty heart, I’ll gradually see what
Paul is getting at in today’s second reading. As with Jesus it’s only in my
weakness that I will find the wisdomand
power of God.
CONCLUSION
The old man in the opening story
of this homily told the young soldiers to write down some prayers. They did and
then tucked them inside their shirts next to their crosses. Today’s readings
suggest going even further. Allow Jesus into your heart, into your temple, and
let him cleanse you as he cleansed the temple in today’s Gospel and then begin
to live by his commandments of the heart, hiscommandments of love. It will hurt. It is the cross. But your heartwill be what you were meant to be: God’s
temple - the Father’s house - a house of prayer.
