9 June 2021
Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
Those of us of a “certain age” remember the late 1960s in which constant clashes occurred between the two extremes of society. A famous photograph visualized the clash between a hippie with the shoulder length hair placing daisies down the gun barrel of a State Trooper whose helmet no doubt covered a very tight crew cut. It was a time when structure and authority were considered obscenities and freedom took on a range of meanings and possibilities as variable as the thousands of opinions held by those that roamed the parks of San Francisco. The great narrative of Western Civilization (and I may be counted here as one who thinks that much in western thought is both great and civilizing), has been a pendulum swing between a greater emphasis on structure and a greater emphasis on human freedom. The Jesuits made a career of navigating between human liberty and the Divine law, attempting to discern the best track to take when law in its particular expression ran contrary to the free dictates of the human conscience. Whatever course they took, the Jesuits (despite the criticisms of Descartes and others) held firm to the idea that alongside human freedom there was an objective reality, and that this reality found its expression in law, both civil and divine. This idea is echoed in today’s reading when Jesus admonishes his disciples on the necessity of following the letter of the law. Today’s reading, for some, may stand in opposition to what they believe is the true message of Jesus: that the correct Christian stance is liberty against law. This is a mistake, a mistake that fails to see that God has established both liberty and law and that driving through life we would be best to pay attention to the lines on both sides of the road. Ignatius understood this point and provided not so much an answer but a challenge for discernment. On one hand, in the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius identifies the necessity of presuming good intention. Yet, in another part, he identifies the importance of thinking with the Church. If we advance the idea of presuming good intention and its presumed liberties, we need to recall Ignatius’s famous (infamous?) recommendation that if the Church sees something as white and we think it is black then its white. Both ideas are from the same pen, from the same author, and from the same source. The gospel reminds us that there are no easy solutions in a complex world and that a facile retreat to the extremes of absolute freedom or absolute law fails to establish the correct way of proceeding.