Friday, August 29, 2025
Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Set apart
This is the will of God: your holiness.
Being set apart (holy) is different from setting myself apart, which might stem from various psychological inadequacies. When God does the work, though, Paul points out that we must respond, with right moral behavior.
Refrain from immorality, acquire a wife or husband, do not commit incest.
There is more to moral life than this. But this especially is difficult. As Erik Varden says in Chastity, “Love bursts open, pricks at us, shouts at us. It is like a fire whose smoke clots our heart, provoking foolishness and aggression. It is an overflowing, an inundation of soul.” (p. 68)
But whoever disregards this call, disregards God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you.
And there is the key. As Jesus told his disciples not to be afraid of him leaving them because their Father would send another – the Holy Spirit – so Paul reminds us too. We are temples, he says elsewhere, of the Holy Spirit. We need not be intimidated or afraid of our sexuality, or of any other gift that can quickly become a curse if we try to live with it on our own.
Could be comfort, tainted by greed. Might be appetite, tainted by gluttony. Could be righteousness, tainted by anger and nursed by bitterness. We are, in fact, helpless to manage these gifts alone. The first three of AA’s famous twelve steps can be shortened to
- I can’t do this.
- God can.
- I think I’ll let him.
The mountains melt like wax before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens proclaim his justice.
Only in spiritual visions do we see the fireworks of heavens proclaiming justice, but those fireworks are there. All the time God is good. Celebrate. Mountains seem unchangeable, firm and stolid on the landscape. Can you imagine them melting, like wax? We don’t get the visions very often, but we can exercise our imaginations, that gift God provided for us to communicate with him. An educated imagination serves us well, especially in the black moments when we forget this intimacy and feel our aloneness as if it were final, rather than one more moment during which to recognize those three famous steps.
- I can’t do this!
- Oh, wait. God can!
- Come, Lord Jesus!!!
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
We are blessed?
You don’t think Jesus meant what he said?
So that’s why, I guess, John the Baptist, wasting away in his prison cell, did not despair (at least not as depicted in The Chosen).
That’s how Jesus, sweating blood in Gethsemane, could say, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
Those words come in handy over and over in my life, whenever I fail to imagine how I’ll make it from this day to the next. In truth, of course, perhaps I won’t. The earth is full of unimaginable dangers, terrors, plots, and careless cruelty. Death comes for the archbishop. Jesus knows that.
And the Holy Spirit knows that too. I imagine the endless battles between good angels and bad ones, in a realm of reality we cannot see.
This is not new or avoidable, this persecution. But “blessed are we.”
Light dawns for the just;
and gladness, for the upright of heart.
Be glad in the LORD, you just,
and give thanks to his holy name.
(1 Thessalonians 4, Psalm 97, Matthew 5, Mark 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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