There I Can Be

The readings for this Sunday encourage us to take action in helping one another with our problems. The trajectory of the readings takes us through our approach to this Christian outreach.

The first reading gives us the sometimes harsh justice and bluntness that the Old Testament often provides. It tells us that if we tell a wicked person that they are wicked but do not seek to help them alter their life, then God will hold us responsible for their downfall. However, if we do seek to help the wicked, even if they refuse, God will not deride us. Rather, in this "you shall save yourself."

Our second reading gives us a chance to associate self-preservation with this challenge to help others. Surely, we all take great care to set out an attractive life for ourselves. To varying levels of success, we seek to know ourselves well enough to learn those things that we must improve on. I have found myself to be too often deficient in compassion, and I have learned that I am compassionate toward newer friends -- whether week to week with high schoolers at Vision or those people I meet day-by-day -- but am too short with my closer friends. We usually take these words of Paul -- "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." -- as something like "treat others how you'd like to be treated," but why not incorporate some sense of self-help into this? If we seek to treat ourselves with a sense of self-improvement and care, let's offer ourselves to others in this way.

It's hard for Catholics who don't espouse an exuberant evangelism of biblical stories and verses and specific preaching points. However, our Christian living can involve some of this. One way that I've come to understand as a way that can work for me is providing an example. To use a gardening analogy, I try to keep my grass green and my flowerbeds bright. My hope is that people will see my landscape and seek to improve their own, whether through conversation with me or without my ever knowing. The challenge here is to not be entirely passive. I have no secret formula for that.

There is no secret formula for any of us. We want to be independent, individualistic, self-sufficient. We don't want the help. We don't want people to act high and mighty or holy-roller-ish or condescending. But hopefully, we can build friendships and relationships of love where the times we must call each other out or pose challenges can come from a genuine, established place of love that mitigates the aversion to help that we can sometimes cling to. For as Jesus tells us this Sunday, and always, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

May we remember that as we love one another and as we criticize and confront one another, especially if we build relationships for love and not popularity or superficial means, that Christ is there with us and in us.