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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
`June 28, 2024
Feast of Irenaeus of Lyon
Readings: II Timothy 2:23 and Luke 11:34-35
Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness.
Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
By what criteria do we judge controversies to be “stupid and senseless”? And similarly, how can we discern whether what we take to be light might actually be darkness? It would have been helpful to have been provided a few examples, don’t you think?
Or would it?
It’s easy to imagine that if someone named a few issues to be “stupid and senseless” that this would result in eruptions of the very controversies that Timothy warned against. Someone else might think very differently. The same is true about light and darkness. If it were possible always and clearly to be able to distinguish between the two, Jesus’ admonition would be simple. But in the thick of life what should seem simple often proves to be challenging and, sometimes, vexing.
Timothy recommended a healthy dose of humility, a virtue that is fast disappearing in our contentious times. People would scoff if it were suggested that in Presidential debates or political ads one should “correct opponents with gentleness.” It would be judged completely ineffectual. And all that counts is the present. Eyes would roll if someone asked about the long-term consequences of our brutalizing tactics. But we’re reaping the whirlwind already.
And an essential element of discernment is the wisdom that can come only across a span of time – what is learned at length. The Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz, when he turned 90 years old, wrote about his eyes (as a poet would). These were his observations:
My most honorable eyes,
You are not in the best of shape…
And you were a pack of greyhounds once…
My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things…
Now what you have seen is… changed into memories or dreams.
I am slowly moving away from the fairgrounds of the world…
What a relief. To be alone with my meditation
On the basic similarity in humans
And their tiny grain of dissimilarity.
Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point,
That grows large and takes me in.
Milosz discovered a lot of light in the increasing physical darkness that was the consequence of age. In this long view, all that is “stupid and senseless” falls away. We can learn a lot from this; just as we can learn much from faith, which is a long view par excellence.
Prayer
Keep our eyes open, O God, to the beauty that is always present, and blind us not to the ugliness which always threatens to spoil it. May we be continually prepared to see the goodness in humanity, and at the same time not be unmindful of the evil into which we so easily slip. We ask these things in remembrance of him who had the eyes to see both the goodness and the meanness in us.
Theodore Parker Ferris: Give Us Grace
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