11 October 2013
Friday of the Twenty-seventh week in Ordinary Time
Spiritual housekeeping is a tricky business. It is hard to get it right. We want to keep a clean house: we examine ourselves, confess our sins, try to amend. This is the work of years – a lifetime – and with the help of the Holy Spirit, something very beautiful can emerge. Good order is from God: truly good order is from God alone.
But we can also become stuck. We can focus on ourselves, on our own efforts – and worse, on our own failings – so much so that we become blind to the saving interventions of God in our lives. The unexpected, sometimes very undesired, things that come our way can throw us off the careful balance we create, and be a blessing.
It is a strange thing, but if we are successful in gaining control of one unruly area of our inner life, we so easily become blind to glaring failures in another. We finally master our gluttony or our lust, and become blind to our lack of charity, or harbor a subtle pride– and run the risk of “seven demons” replacing the one we have expelled.
It is the Holy Spirit who alone heals and gives the fullness of life: it is the Holy Spirit to whom we must turn, on whom we must rely, if we are to be the good householders God wants us to be. That is the spirit of love, as revealed in the life of Jesus – who was friend of tax collectors and prostitutes who were open to the sweeping change His love would bring into their very messy lives. The order of love.