June 14, 2009 Cycle B
In the last weeks of May we celebrated Memorial Day. And this Sunday is the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. Also known as Corpus Christi. Memorial Day celebrated the deeds of the dead and the other celebrates unity of all the baptized in one Body of Christ. Let’s reflect on joining these two concepts together.
Allow me to start off with some unpleasant facts:
Soldier’s left home, lived in barracks, ate military food, suffered hardships in the jungles and deserts, were wounded and sometimes died far from home. Because they did all this we are free. What they did affects us all. In a kind of spiritual joining through some kind of deep connection, the soldier dying in the deserts of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan, has touched our lives. There’s no doubt about it: there is synergy, a deep action and reaction that binds the human race.
This common experience contradicts the popular philosophy that we are independent, that we live in a world where each person is a separate atom and a solitary individual, that we are free floating organisms, a bundle of selfish genes, that we are unrelated and uncollected to others. In such a scenario pain becomes utterly without meaning and utterly ridiculous. But we don’t believe that for a moment. In fact, in the religious terms of today’s feast, we are the Body of Christ! We are members of the same body, interconnected by Baptism, joined by grace, united by a common spirit. What we do or fail to do affects others: our love, our rejection, our prayer, our suffering, and our pain. Suffering and pain are hated and feared by modern society. But if you are connected, united, part of the very Body of Christ, then suffering and pain become powerful agents of grace. No body wants to experience them, but when they come they are spiritual barter and spiritual power. That’s why, in the old days, we did something else with pain and suffering. If you promise not to laugh, I’ll tell you what it is: We could offer it up for the souls in purgatory, or anyone else for that matter. Modern folks today find this a quaint thought. It provokes ridicule and smiles. Offering up sufferings for others boggles the modern individualistic mind.
But Christian truth is different. Simply put, it is this: we are the Body of Christ, and we are connected. Christian witness says that we are in physical, psychic, and spiritual relationship with one another. We can plead for one another, and we can pray for one another. We can offer up acts of courage, endurance, and suffering for others. We can even die and some how in the great cycle of life and love it can benefit others.
In Charles Dickens book A Tale of Two Cities, it’s just not that Sydney Carton took the place of his friend on the gallows. It not just that St. Maximillian Kolbe took the place of a prisoner in a concentration camp and died in his place. It’s not just that United States soldiers in WWI and WWII, and in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and in all the other wars, died so that we might be free. What’s important for us to remember today is that we human beings can do things that affect others because we are spiritually joined. Because we are spiritually united we can direct our energies and our prayers, and our sufferings and deaths.
If you have asthma, for example, is it absurd to offer up your discomfort for those who are suffocating in inner city tenements on a hot summer’s day? Lying on your hospital bed, is it silly to offer your pain for those who are in languish in nursing homes? When you are hungry, is it ridiculous to offer up your hunger for those who daily go to sleep without anything to eat? Is it outrageous for you to offer up your migraine headache, your pain, your cancer, your sickness, for hardened sinners? And for those you love? And for those you hate?
A society that sells drugs, facelifts and pills for every occasion says, “Yes it is absurd. Suffering has no meaning. It has no redemptive value.” But we Catholics say it does by the Grace of God, suffering can be redemptive. In an unknown way, we can gain graces for countless others, for we are the Body of Christ.
Amen. Amen. Msgr. Tom, Pastor Christ the King