I have to admit that I am having a lot of feelings this weekend. Some are really happy feelings, and some, to be honest, are sad ones. Some are feelings of confusion or frustration, and some are feelings of intense gratitude and joy.
As obvious as it sounds, feelings are meant to be felt. Many times we shy away from feeling our feelings - which is really a matter of acknowledging what our experience is or has been and allowing that experience to change us, for better or worse. We tend to shy away from feelings because somewhere along the line we picked up the belief that certain feelings are “good” and certain feelings are “bad.” The words “good” and “bad” are about the most unhelpful words in the English language when it comes to describing the movements of our interiority.
We learned to moralize - to “goodify” or to “badify” - often at a young age, from well meaning parents or teachers who said things like, “Aw don’t cry! Don’t be sad.” Or “you should be happier about this opportunity” or “You shouldn’t still be mad about this.” We were told this because it’s what that person was once told. This is one of the many ways in which generational emotional dysfunction in families takes root and continues.
Learning to feel feelings, to acknowledge how something that has happened either to us directly or within our lives has affected us, is never about good or bad. Feelings are not about “what” or “why”, they are about “how.” How does this experience affect me? How does this experience move me? how does this experience confuse or delight me? How does this experience make my heart or my life look different or take a different path? And what we glean from this “how” is not good or bad; but it serves simply as good information. I had a therapist once who would say, “that’s great data.”
Data for what? Information for what? Two things: knowing ourselves and for living our lives. Integrated and happy people are integrated and happy because they live their lives from a place of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-gift. I know myself, I accept myself simply as a fact (yes, I maybe have things I’d like to change or improve but at the basic level I can say “By the grace of God I am what I am”), and this knowledge plus the peace that comes with this simple acceptance allows me to be generous with the way I spend my time, the way I interact with others, and it changes my worldview from one of entitlement/self-centeredness to one of generosity, gratitude, and joy.
So I mentioned that this weekend I am having a lot of feelings. I just came home last night from Nashville, where someone very important to me - and whose family I’ve come to know in a way that only God could design - was ordained a priest. True joy. On the way home from Nashville, we learned that one of our ordination classmates in 2018, Fr Anthony Nyamai, passed away suddenly in his rectory in Crest Hill. True sadness and confusion. I’m filled with so much gratitude and pride for Fr. Sam Bergmann, who will celebrate Mass here today at 11:30, and as I watch him begin his priesthood with so much joy and hope, I am thinking of my impending departure from Visitation and beginning of Canon Law studies this August. So that’s bittersweet. At 9:30 today Bishop Siegel will be here to celebrate Mass and then dedicate our new Parish Administration building; I feel a lot of gratitude for the parishioners of Visitation who have made that possible, and a tinge of sadness that I’ll never really get to see it.
Are all these things good or bad? Is the data they’ve given me good or bad?
In the Gospel today, we heard that Jesus looked out at the crowds that had been following him, and we learn that as he looks his heart is “moved with pity for them.” If he’d been a person who didn’t like the way certain things made him feel, he’d have kept walking. Maybe he would have thought “that’s interesting” or “what a sorry looking group lol” and then bottled it up and kept living.
But he gets curious.
“What about this crowd is moving me to pity?” Perhaps he was thinking about the lines from the Book of Exodus that we heard today, the lines wherein God promises Israel that if they keep this covenant they will be “dearer” to him than all other peoples, that they are a holy nation. Maybe Jesus thought about the psalm from this morning: “We are his people the sheep of his flock” and felt pity because this nation had stopped singing that refrain long ago, and had themselves either fall away from the covenant or had become so obsessed with the letter of the law that they’d forgotten its spirit.
“What about this crowd is moving me to pity?” They were wandering around, looking for the totalizing, all-encompassing reality of God, but because in their day they had no “prince, prophet, or leader” to point him out, they were missing the fact that the “kingdom of heaven is at hand” for them. He thinks, “this crowd are like sheep without a shepherd.”
Another chance to feel something and move right along. “Sheep without a shepherd. Gee, I sure hope they find a shepherd soon! Bye bye now!”
But the information, the data he had from what he felt and noticed came into play both for knowing himself and also making the decision that came right after.
“This crowd is like sheep without a shepherd, but they are not sheep without a shepherd, because I am the Good Shepherd and I am standing right here.”
So he calls Twelve of those closest to him and appoints them as laborers for this abundant harvest. He fills them with his power and sends them out.
But what if he’d bottled up the pity?
Or acknowledged it but refused to let it move him?
Or let it move him but “didn’t wanna” do anything about it?
Or wanted to do something about it but would get to it later, or wait until the people who made him nervous had gone home, or maybe try again when the political climate was different?
And this, of course, is the value of paying attention to what’s going on around us and how it’s moving things within us, and then living a principled life based on what we know to be true and who we know ourselves to be.
To live any other way is to risk being ungrounded, one version of me with this group and another version of me with that group; a family version, a group-chat version, a school version, a significant other version, and a “by myself” version.
Jesus understood that his whole mission, the whole reason he was sent by the Father, would be constantly at risk of being lost if gave into many of the thousands of human pressures and temptations.
He understood very well that he was being asked to give absolutely every part of himself to this mission, he had to be “all in”, and make a total self-gift of himself.
Sometimes we look at the way of the Gospel as boring or restrictive. Maybe we won’t all take the formal vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, but deep down I think we all intuitively understand that to follow Jesus as faithfully and as closely as the first Apostles did requires from each of us some version of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
To imitate the Lord in these ways helps to imitate the pattern of his life, but also to become open and available to the path set before us. And that’s the word I’d like you to remember from this: availability. Paying attention to your insides, to the things you notice and the things you feel, paying attention to how certain experiences affect you, and being aware enough of your own deepest convictions that are able to respond to the things in your life in a measured, sane, and principled way even when you don’t want to or when the pressures around you are very great: this is all a way of saying that you have become available to God.
My sense is that each one of us knows what it’s like to be in a position like Jesus is in this Gospel. To be moved with some emotion, to see a concrete need, and unsure of what precisely we should do or what others might think or of how it might make x,y,z other thing better or harder, we choose to do an easier thing or a more comfortable thing or simply nothing at all….and then kick ourselves for it because we knew we were capable of much more.
So as we receive the Eucharist today, let’s ask for the grace to be aware and to be curious, so that we can be available when the Lord calls on us as laborers for his harvest.
