Word to the Wise
Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - Tuesday in the 28th Week in Ordinary Time
[Gal 5:1-6 and Luke 11:37-41]"Oh you Pharisees! Although you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, inside you are filled with plunder and evil. You fools! Did not the maker of the outside also make the inside?" [Luke]
I once gave a retreat to some Dominican sisters entitled, "Dominican outside, Dominican inside?" which was inspired by the blunt accusation by Jesus against the Pharisees. It's not that I considered those sisters to be guilty of the hypocrisy that Jesus and the subsequent Christian community leveled against the Pharisees! What I was aiming at is the importance of an integrity between the person we reflect to the world at large and the person we know within. Sometimes we don't even know who the person within really is because of the efforts we are making to maintain the external image! It reminds me of a song by a folk singer named Melanie back in the late 1960's that had the words, "wearing the company outfit and singing the company song...."
How do we, as a matter of faith, bring the outside and inside together so that there is integrity in our efforts to follow Jesus? For a Dominican, it is not enough simply to wear the habit and show up for prayer, meals and work. This could be true in any of the professions where we speak of "going through the motions," but not being fully engaged because it's not really what or who we consider ourselves to be. This causes a lot of misery for many people.
The Lord has given us the opportunity to live a life of integrity by internalizing the teachings of Jesus so that we have the virtues and values that can motivate whatever we do. When we act against those virtues and values because external temptations present us with contrary things, we set the outside against the inside and integrity is lost. We all fail at times to live up to our Christian values, but one would hope this is only temporary and that those inside values are still in place and leading us. God made the inside as well as the outside. Keeping them together is our task. AMEN
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