Monday, August 27 “committed to being surprised”
When I pray from Mark or Matthew or Luke (the three “synoptic gospels”), it helps me to treat the evangelist like a poet, to allow the surprise buried in the text to stop me in my tracks, like a strong poem does.
When I wrote this poem based on Mark 1:15 about the time I took a job here in 1980, I found the challenges facing the university daunting. Sayings like this one: “Repent and believe the good news” began to get my attention, like a strong poem should. The teaching of Ignatius, that I ask to grow in “intimate knowledge of our Lord who has become human . . .” (in Latin “intima cognitio”) began to challenge me; to become human means, among other things, being born in some particular place with its own history. Jesus, my history told me, was born in one of the world’s meanest, poorest, and most violent places — the Roman Empire’s grinding police state where crucifixion of people who opposed that state became horrors up and down that small country (e.g., as many as 2000 rebel fighters during one period in the early childhood of the boy Jesus). Sometimes it took a day or two for a strong man to suffocate to death; crucifixion was intended to intimidate and subdue opposition.
For me that became the surprise of taking the saying of the young man Jesus, “Repent and believe the good news” as meant seriously. What could the poet mean? And that led me, little by little, to notice that where I was born (Marinette, WI, 1939) was a much less frightening place than where Jesus was born. More, for example, like the lives of immigrant children torn away from their mothers and fathers at U.S. borders the past few months. It helps, when I read this saying from Mark 1:15, to be open to deep, shocking, life-giving surprise, like every strong poem. Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.
Not everything about my Catholic faith makes me proud; but this teaching and men and women who have tried to live it often stops me in my tracks, like any strong poem should.
Have a blest week,
john sj
Today’s Post “Repent and believe the good news.” {Mk 1:15}
Is our main repenting, perhaps, made of believing good news,
that there is news,
something new,
and it is good?
That what we already know is not all there is,
that we must approach the presence of God
knowing we will be surprised,
committed to being surprised
and so to living in a surprise-able way?