Overview:

Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

“The mother of Jesus and his brothers came to him but were unable to join him because of the crowd. He was told, ‘Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and they wish to see you.’ He said to them in reply, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.’” (Lk 8:19-21)

Find today’s readings here.

A close friend is finishing up an arts residency in the south of France, preparing to walk the Camino de Santiago for the month of October and then heading to India for a meditation retreat on the outskirts of Delhi. Eventually he plans to go to Dharmashala in northern India for some time to live and pray where His Holiness the Dalai Lama serves as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

A successful actor in Los Angeles with dozens of commercials to his name, at age 55 he sold or gave away all of his possessions except what he could carry with him in a single, burnt orange backpack and hit the road.

It would be easy, I think, to see this man as one of those bohemian global tourists of vaguely-defined life direction, the wind blowing him to whatever spiritual hot spot pops up on a whimsical inner compass. The Camino. The Dalai Lama. All that.

Not so. For my friend, it is all divinely directed. He has given his life over to God as definitively as anyone I know. He wakes up every morning and immediately prays for, as he puts it, “knowledge of God’s will and the power to carry that out.” And he takes God’s direction seriously. (And he does all this not just for the sake of personal enlightenment; he also serves the grief-stricken, the lost, those whose lives are falling apart.) He is not following the whims of a blank passport but, as best he can, the will of the divine power of the universe.

He is not unlike St. Ignatius of Loyola when he was General of the Society of Jesus. As a spiritual guide and religious leader in correspondence with religious and royalty across the globe, Ignatius ended many of his letters with one or another version of this line: “May [God] by His infinite and sovereign goodness grant us abundant grace to know His most holy will and perfectly to fulfill it.”

“Knowledge of God’s will and the power to carry that out.” “Grace to know His will and perfectly to fulfill it.” These phrases in one way or another echo the message of today’s Gospel, “My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” 

My closest followers, the ones as near as blood kin, are those who listen to me, hear me, understand what I want from them, and then carry that out. It is that simple.

(And not that simple: St. Ignatius set down more than 20 rules, methods and steps for discerning spirits, for understanding God’s will. Sometimes it is utterly clear, and sometimes it takes time and effort.) 

But God’s word, God’s will, is knowable. In the Book of Deuteronomy God tells the people of Israel that his word is not high up in heaven or across the vast sea and so impossible to reach. It is in our mouths and our hearts. We can hear it, we can act on it.

My friend is a free man. Following the will of God has not yoked him to a capricious power casting him hither and yon. It has liberated him. He gave away everything. And, as much as anyone I know, he has everything. 

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”