Donkeys and the Heart of Life
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
July 27, 2021
Clergy among themselves sometimes call funerals and weddings “donkey” events. This is not because they are like a Palm Sunday procession, or somehow resemble donkeys in the speaker’s mind. Rather, it is because they, like any beast of burden, are loaded with extraneous baggage. They are “fraught,” or freighted with emotions and judgments from a whole range of life experience. So, we say among ourselves, it is very important to listen carefully to requests and to accommodate them when we can. The real problems arise in such events when those with a stake in them strongly differ in their judgments and requests, i.e., when the donkeys carry conflicting baggage. It’s not just weddings and funerals, either: many of the differences we run into about church and community life are the result the different personal luggage we each try to make them carry.
As I prepare to go on Sabbatical starting Sunday, I have been doing a lot of thinking about relationships and how often such issues are things of the head, and act as mere stand-ins for deeper things of the heart.
A friend recently shared a quote with me from Thomas Merton, “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we see in them.”
Another friend shared a touching story about care-giving for someone with dementia: a son regularly visited his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother. Sometimes she would greet him as her husband; sometimes her brother in her youth. Asked by medical staff whether this bothered him, he replied, “Oh no. She may not know exactly who I am because of her illness. She floats between the different ages of her life’s memory. So she calls me by the name of the person I seem to look like, regardless from when that memory was formed. But through it all, she knows I am there, and that she loves me. And that is enough.”
When we leave our loved ones here behind, and go to meet our Jesus and the loved ones who have gone on before, I think that few of us will remember exactly the details of what others said or did. But we will remember clearly how they made us feel.
I pray that all of us—especially me—can focus on the deeper things of life, the things of the heart, and not let ourselves be distracted from them by the outer things—issues, opinions, courses of action—that in the long run are mere donkeys that carry the deeper baggage of our hearts.
Keep me and Elena in your prayers, as we will keep you in ours. See you in November.
Grace and Peace.
Fr. Tony+
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