L.J. shares the following reflection on Sunday's reading from the Gospel according to Luke:
Jesus doles out some tough wisdom today. Happiness lies in God alone. So, not even our families constitute happiness. To follow Jesus into the joy of oneness with God, we have to be loyal to God alone, even more than to our families. Meister Eckhart, however, says denying self is “not merely a commandment…it is a promise and a divine prescription for a man to make all his suffering, all his deeds, and all his life happy and joyful.” The way of the cross frees our inherent joy from all the things to which we shackle it.
Patrick McDonnell, the creator of the comic strip Mutts, wrote a children’s book called The Gift of Nothing. In it, Mooch the cat looks for a gift for Earl the dog. Mooch sees Earl has a bowl, a bed, and a chew toy. He has it all! So, Mooch thought, “What do you get someone who has everything?” “Nothing!” Mooch discovers he can give Earl the gift of nothing! But then, Mooch encounters a problem. Where can he get nothing in a world chock-full of somethings? He searches on TV, outside, and in a store. He doesn’t find the gift of nothing anywhere. Exhausted, Mooch plops down on his favorite pillow and just sits still, silent. “And not looking for it, he found nothing,” writes McDonnell. Mooch then gets a big box for “the nothing.” He traipses over to Earl’s house and gives him the big box full of nothing. Earl opens it and says, “There’s nothing here,” and Mooch replies, “Yesh! Nothing…but me and you.” Mooch and Earl give each other a big hug and then both of them sit down. They become still and silent to enjoy nothing… “and everything.”
The gift of nothing is the gift of true happiness. It is the gift Jesus gives us and the path he teaches us in today’s very hard Gospel. Turning to the crowds following him, Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus doles out some tough wisdom today. Happiness lies in God alone. So, not even our families constitute happiness. To follow Jesus into the joy of oneness with God, we have to be loyal to God alone, even more than to our families.
Jesus is not saying family is sinful or somehow wrong. He is attacking our attitudes towards family, particularly our tendency to treat family as an idol. In the name of family, we can justify all sorts of senseless behaviors. The Christian right uses “family values” as an excuse to hate the LGBTQ community. The problem is not things in themselves, but our attachment to them. When Jesus says we have to “hate our families” he is calling us to surrender our co-dependence on our families. Healthy and loving relationships with our families are not at stake here. If anything, detachment creates more loving families because the detached person does not expect infinite happiness from their spouse and children.
“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” The way of the cross is the way of joy, as we have been exploring in these reflections on Gospel happiness. In today’s reading, Jesus clearly lays out the principle of joy: hating family, carrying the cross, and renouncing possessions. These may not strike us as happy teachings, but rather as hard and punishing. Meister Eckhart, however, says denying self is “not merely a commandment…it is a promise and a divine prescription for a man to make all his suffering, all his deeds, and all his life happy and joyful.” The way of the cross frees our inherent joy from all the things to which we shackle it.
Through the two metaphors of building a tower and a king going to war, Jesus implores us to calculate the cost of our attachments. He wants us to see what they are doing to our lives. It helps to recall Meister Eckhart’s wisdom: “all suffering comes from attachment.” We chain our hearts to things like success, money, owning a home, earning a degree, or having a beautiful family. They rob us of joy because we are invested in procuring these things and protecting them lest we become miserable at their loss. That is a lot of energy to spend on something that doesn’t give lasting happiness.
Still, how do we enjoy nothing and everything like Mooch and Earl and as Jesus teaches us? We have to practice interior silence. We have to enter the interior state of nothingness. First, we have to take a line from an obscure medieval Dominican friar, William Peraldus, who says, “prayer is easy!” This is not hard. All that is required is to stop thinking and to sink into the nothingness of God. It is to practice non-resistance, non-retention, and non-reaction towards our thoughts and feelings. To do so is to enjoy the Mystery of God within by not paying attention to our thinking. This is contemplation. Thomas Aquinas says, “Contemplation consists in the simple enjoyment of the truth.” We enjoy reality as it is, in this very moment, but shorn of our false ideas of happiness. We close our eyes, breathe deeply, ignore our thinking, and enjoy the blissful nothingness within.