The Things That Take Our Freedom
A week can acquire a shape without our noticing it. One conversation raises a question, another exposes something we had overlooked, and by the end of the week several things that seemed unrelated begin to look like parts of the same problem.
Catholic worship has something of this quality built into it. At every Mass, passages from Scripture are read according to a calendar shared by Catholics around the world. Sundays follow a three-year cycle, while weekday readings move through their own two-year cycle. The seasons have names such as Advent, Lent, Easter and Ordinary Time, and the readings often carry a conversation across several days. Anyone curious about what Catholics are hearing on a given day can find the readings on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or in any number of daily missals and prayer apps.
This past week, the twentieth week of Ordinary Time, offered an unusually coherent conversation.
It began with a wealthy young man who wanted eternal life but could not let go of what he owned. Jesus then spoke about wealth and the difficulty of entering the Kingdom of God. A landowner paid workers who arrived late the same wage as those who had worked all day. A king invited people to a wedding feast and discovered that many were too occupied with their ordinary affairs to come. Jesus reduced the law to love of God and neighbor. Finally, he warned against religious people who cared more about appearing righteous than becoming so.
Read separately, these passages concern wealth, generosity, invitation, love and humility. Read together, they seem to circle one larger question. What has the power to make a person less free?
The young man who approaches Jesus at the beginning of the week is not a bad man. Matthew tells us that he has kept the commandments. He is serious enough about his life to ask what he still lacks. Jesus answers by touching the one thing the man apparently cannot imagine surrendering. He tells him to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor and follow him. The young man walks away sad because he owns a great deal.
The next day Jesus pushes the point further with his famous image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. The disciples are startled enough to ask who can possibly be saved. Jesus does not respond with a better technique for detachment. He tells them that what is impossible for human beings is possible for God.
Christian tradition has never required every person to dispose of all private property. Some Christians, most visibly monks, nuns, religious sisters and brothers, have freely chosen radical poverty. For everyone else, the question remains less about how many things one possesses than about the relationship one has with them.
Francis de Sales understood this particularly well. Writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he addressed his Introduction to the Devout Life largely to people who would remain in ordinary society. They had families, professions, property and obligations. He thought holiness belonged there too. The task was not to flee created things but to learn their proper place.
That distinction reaches far beyond money. A career can provide useful work and slowly become the measure of a life. A house can offer shelter and become something that must be protected at unreasonable cost. Reputation, physical appearance, comfort, political identity and even plans for the future can quietly acquire the same authority. Something good becomes troublesome when losing it begins to feel like losing ourselves.
The Gospel then moves into the vineyard. A landowner hires laborers throughout the day. Some begin early in the morning. Others arrive near the end. When evening comes, he gives each worker the same wage. The people who worked longest object. Their complaint seems reasonable because most of us instinctively read the scene as an employment dispute.
The ancient Christian interpreters generally understood the vineyard as God’s kingdom and the day’s wage as the life God gives. The USCCB’s commentary on Matthew notes that, in its place within the Gospel, the parable points toward the equality of the disciples in receiving eternal life. No one receives more of God because he arrived earlier.
Pope Benedict XVI noticed another detail. Reflecting on this parable in 2008, he said that being called into the vineyard is itself part of the reward. The workers who understand their labor only as the price of a future payment have misunderstood what has already been given to them. To participate in the work is already a gift.
That interpretation changes the complaint of the early workers. Their problem is no longer simply that someone else received too much. They have begun measuring their own good by what someone else received.
Comparison can do that. A satisfying life can suddenly appear deficient when placed next to another person’s promotion, house, marriage, talent, health or good fortune. Nothing about our circumstances may have changed. Only the comparison has changed, yet the experience of those circumstances changes with it.
The workers in the vineyard have received exactly what they were promised. They become dissatisfied only when generosity reaches someone else.
The next day’s wedding feast turns the question again. A king prepares a banquet and sends word to those who have been invited. They refuse. Some return to their farms and businesses. Eventually the king sends his servants into the roads and fills the hall with people they find there.
Farm and business are curious details because neither is condemned. They are ordinary responsibilities. The people in the parable do not necessarily reject the feast because they have chosen something wicked. Some simply have other things to do.
That possibility feels familiar in a life crowded with legitimate obligations. Work matters. Homes need attention. Families make claims on time. Exercise is good. Planning for the future is prudent. There is always another message to answer and another useful thing that could be finished.
A life can become disordered without containing anything obviously wrong. Good things simply occupy so much space that there is no longer room for the feast.
The ancient interpreters also paid attention to the guest who finally comes but lacks the wedding garment. Gregory the Great associated the garment with charity. Augustine likewise understood the problem as something deeper than merely showing up. The invitation is freely given, but receiving an invitation and allowing it to change us are not quite the same thing.
By Friday the imagery disappears. A scholar asks Jesus to name the greatest commandment. Jesus answers by joining two passages of the Hebrew Scriptures: love God with the whole person, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else, he says, hangs upon these.
Possessions, work, religious practice and ordinary responsibilities are not being rejected. They are being placed in an order. Love determines that order.
Benedict of Nursia understood how easily such an idea could remain abstract. When he wrote his Rule for the small communities gathering around him, he did not leave love as a general aspiration. The fourth chapter begins with the commands to love God and neighbor, then immediately becomes concrete. Care for the poor. Visit the sick. Help someone in trouble. Console the sorrowful. Refuse retaliation. Make peace before the day ends. Benedict calls these the tools of a spiritual craft.
His monastery becomes a workshop in which love is practiced until it begins to shape the person practicing it.
That practical instinct runs throughout the Rule. Benedict tells the cellarer, the monk responsible for provisions, to treat the monastery’s property with extraordinary care. Elsewhere, the tools and goods of the monastery are to be regarded almost as sacred vessels. He is not suspicious of material things themselves. He wants people to use them without becoming careless, possessive or consumed by them.
His answer to overwork is similarly concrete. The monastery has hours for work, but the bell eventually rings. Work stops because something else now deserves attention. Prayer begins. The community eats. Night comes. The unfinished task will still exist tomorrow.
There is a quiet wisdom in allowing a good thing to end because another good thing has begun.
Saturday brings the week’s final warning. Jesus turns toward the scribes and Pharisees, religious people whose practices have become entangled with recognition. They enjoy titles, places of honor and visible signs of devotion. Jesus’ criticism is not that religious observance is useless. He explicitly acknowledges their teaching. The problem is the widening distance between what they teach and the people they are becoming. Religion itself can become something that possesses us.
Knowledge can become status. Service can become identity. Devotion can become performance. Even humility can become a role that depends upon someone noticing it.
Benedict spends the longest chapter of his Rule considering humility, yet he gives surprisingly little attention to appearing humble. His concern is formation. A monk learns to listen, accept correction, restrain unnecessary speech and gradually surrender the need to place himself at the center. Humility appears less as an achievement than as freedom from constant self-reference.
Seen this way, the Gospel readings of the week begin to converge. The wealthy man cannot imagine himself without what he owns. The vineyard workers cannot enjoy what they have received once they see what someone else has received. The invited guests are too occupied to recognize the importance of the invitation. The religious leaders have allowed faith itself to become a source of distinction. Each has encountered something good that has slipped out of its proper place.
This may be where the readings cross the boundary between Christian belief and ordinary human experience. A person does not have to believe in the Kingdom of God to recognize the problem they describe. Possessions can possess their owner. Comparison can ruin contentment. Work can crowd out life. Ideals can become performances. A person can become so busy managing the pieces of a life that the purpose of the life disappears from view.
Christianity gives that order a name. Jesus calls it love of God and love of neighbor. Benedict gives it a daily form.
For fifteen centuries people have continued listening to his Rule partly because he understood that disorder rarely announces itself dramatically. It happens among ordinary things. Work receives a little too much importance. Possessions become a little too necessary. Recognition begins to matter more than it once did. The calendar fills. Attention narrows.
Benedict responds with rhythm, stewardship, community and prayer. The bell rings and reminds the monk that the thing occupying his attention is not the only thing that matters.
Few people live within hearing distance of a monastery bell now. The need for one has not disappeared.
Perhaps the week’s readings invite a simple kind of attention. Notice the thing that has become difficult to put down. Notice the comparison that changes gratitude into dissatisfaction. Notice what repeatedly seems too important to interrupt. Notice whether the practices meant to shape a good life have gradually become another way of displaying one.
None of these things has to be thrown away. They may simply need to be returned to their proper place.