What is good and what is bad?

By F. Luis Casasús, General Superior of Idente missionaries
Commentary on the Sunday Gospel of 30-7-2017, Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (1st book of Kings 3:5.7-12; Letter to the Romans 8:28-30; Saint Matthew 13:44-52)

This was the question of Solomon. And this is the problem of every human being as well. The difficulty lies in what we understand to mean by good and bad and this depends on our motives, our intentions and goals. This desire for clarifying what is good and what is bad is a consequence of the most powerful law that governs our lives: the law of perfection.

But the truth is that we cannot help taking decisions all the time, and we do this according to our poor and mediocre use of this “instinct” or permanent quest for perfection.

Solomon does not ask for a deeper relationship with God, but for a gift that will help him serve others better. He did not asked for long life or riches or the lives of his enemies, but for the service of his neighbors. Solomon knew that in the final analysis, meaning and happiness in life is not just a matter of being right in our judgments, having power or wealth but when we truly give ourselves in service to others.

What about us? The parable of the dragnet tells us that we need to purify our motives; we must distinguish between what we do and why we do.  It is not enough to do the right thing but we must do it with the right intention: to please our heavenly Father.   Only then can we speak of real and authentic service, otherwise it is still worldly pursuits for self under the guise of spiritual service, which is even more insidious and dangerous.  That is why Christ reserved the harsh scolding not for sinners but the self-righteous and hypocritical religious leaders.

Of course, we cannot purify our motives by our own efforts alone…but our role in this process is essential! Sometimes we are victims of the instinct for happiness and this is the clearest manifestation of our misuse of the powerful tendency to perfection. As our Father Founder had said, even the professional and organized thieves use their energies to the full to carry out the perfect crime, such as the perfect bank robbery.

For his part, the Holy Spirit makes every possible effort to purify us, to make clear how much our intentions (both conscious and unconscious) matter and therefore our mystical life is filled with the manifestations of his intense activity: apathy, emptiness, aridity, vacillation,…are pushing us away from our instinct for happiness, particularly in the case of consecrated people, from our desire to see recognition or immediate fruits.

When we accept this purification, we start asking everything in His name and we receive the same response as Solomon: I do as you requested. And little by little we can say with Saint Paul: We know that all things work for good for those who love God.

But we lack a clear vision of our future and of the plans of God.

There is a story of a monk who went around bowing to everyone and saying: I would never disparage you, because you will become saint someday. He relinquished study, incense offering and other practices, and simply bowed deeply, body and soul, to everyone. That was his sole practice.

A spiritual director asked his novices: How do we know when the night is over and the day has come? The students proposed all sorts of answers. Is it when I can tell the difference between my field and my neighbor’s field? Is it when I can tell the difference between my house and my neighbor’s house? Is it when I can see an animal and can tell whether it’s a cow or a horse or a sheep? Is it when I can see a flower and distinguish its color?

No, no, no, the spiritual director shook his head sadly. Night is over and the day has come when you look into the face of your neighbor and you can see that he is your brother or your sister. That you belong to each other.

This is the understanding and the vision we acquire if we accept the Kingdom of Heaven, the immediate will of God for me, hic et nunc, here and now.

In order to do this, to be on the way of perfection, we must be willing sell many pearls. That is, to step outside of our usual safety, to go beyond our comfort zones. This is one reason why working a spiritual director, a rector, and working with a community is so important. All of us, no matter how much effort we make, are not always capable of seeing clearly. We are like fish in our own tank. Little by little the water can get dirty, and since it is just a little bit each day we do not even notice it is dirty. Then our brother or rector, or superior, or perhaps the Holy Spirit with a subtle remark, comes into our space and it is so obvious — hey, the water here is pretty dirty. Even though we may be working hard, each with the intention of cleaning the water, we may not notice the subtle leaks, the ones we ca not see, that may be obvious to those around us. We all have blind spots about ourselves and our motivations. We may be prone to ‘spiritual bypassing’ and make every effort to stay ‘positive’ and avoid our more difficult feelings. A spiritual director and a brother/sister in my community is someone with whom I can be honest and share my deepest desires. St. Brigid said once: Anyone without a soul friend is like a body without a head, is like the water of a polluted lake.

As long as we are preoccupied with self-serving, self-aggrandizing motives, those will be the motives behind our speech and our actions. We may tell people we want one thing, when, perhaps unconsciously, we want only to have our ego stroked. When we walk alone our spiritual path, we will speak to put others down in order that we may feel superior; we will gossip about others in order to maximize our own importance at the expense of another’s; we will lie if it helps us get what we want for ourselves; we will use our past accomplishments to try to impress others of our worthiness.

Both parables about pearls have the same objective: to reveal the presence of the Kingdom, but each one reveals it in a diverse way: through the discovery of the gratuity of God’s action in us (mystical life), and through the effort and the search which each human being makes to discover always better, the sense of his/her life (ascetic effort).

Christ is the kingdom of God for us because we have experienced His love and goodness. We should be very joyful people however, in some moments many of us do not radiate this joy, in fact sometimes we live as if we are the most miserable people, having to abandon our dreams, having to fulfill our duties, not being able to do our own will like the rest of the world. What is lacking, and why?

It is because we have not given ourselves completely to the treasure and the pearl yet, and thus the treasure and pearl which we have found are still outside us and not within us. They remain only as an idea or a good wish. Happiness and joy in the world are transient and cannot last very long. So the joy is short-lived.

Is Jesus the pearl that we are willing to give up everything for? Are we every moment willing to pay the price to be with Jesus? The stark reality is that, too often, we consider Jesus to be not like a treasure or an incomparable pearl but some item from a clearance sale. We do not mind having Jesus if the price is not too high. We desire to have both, if possible. We want the world and also Jesus, provided He can give us the worldly things as well, especially recognition, being admired and understood.

We have to remind ourselves of the treasure that we have found: Our heavenly Father, a Father who also gives all, who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old. Our Father is the seemingly foolish merchant who has bought our salvation far from a bargain price. Our Father is the hopeful romantic digging through the field who shovels through the crap we have buried ourselves in, and finally finding us, joyfully declares: You are my treasure.