23rd Sunday Ordinary Time (C) 09/08/2013
One night there is a firein a convent and several nuns who live on the fourth floor are trapped. They are all praying for Divine Providence to show them a way out when the mother superior shouts, ‘We need to take off our robes, tie them together, and climb down to safety.’
Later as they are recounting the event to reporters, they are asked if they were afraid that the crude rope might not hold up. ‘Oh, no,’ the mother superior says, ‘you see… old habits are very hard to break.’
Many of us are taught – hopefully – at a very early age the need that we have for discipline and sacrifice. They teach us patience and help us to defer immediate gratification. They offer us clear boundaries and goals. They can also become ‘old habits [that] are very hard to break.’
Discipline and sacrificeinitially establish our egos and then become agents of our established identities. They provide us with a sense of achievement and a sense of failure (when we don’t achieve). Competition and comparison, judgment and distinctions, being part of the in-group and the out-group all provide us an unconscious familiarity.
Whenever we do something for a time, we develop an unconscious pattern. The first few years, for example, after I graduated, each August I would gradually become conscious that the pattern of preparation to return to school was unconsciouslyoperating within me. I suspect that the same is true for people who retire and parents who are used to having children around the house. The pattern of behavior is so ingrained that we don’t realize that things have changed. This, I suspect, is what Jesus is telling us in today’s gospel story from Luke.
When we experience God dwelling with us, our experience transforms our lives and changes the way that we relate with others and ourselves. The familiar pattern no longer works for us. Yet, unconsciously we are urged to continue to relate in the way that we did before our transforming experience.
It is important for us, then, to practicea willingness to liveconsciously. We do this by practicing a willingness to observe ourselves without judgment and with compassion which allows usto begin to see our‘old habits [that] are very hard to break.’
Our first instinct tends to be to use discipline and sacrifice to change ourold habits, but doing so only reinforces them and pushes them deeper into our unconsciousness. We are instead instructed to see the bigger picture by Jesus; to recognize that we don’t have the necessary material or power to complete the job. We need the help of God who transforms our lives not because we meritto be transformed (the language of our established identity), but because God (who dwells with us) mysteriously loves us and is willing to suffer with us.
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