January 22, 2012
3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Daniel Levinson, in his book The Seasons of a Man’s Life, has written about a general, human life cycle. This is the idea that the journey from birth to old age follows an underlying, universal pattern on which there are many individual variations. There is a basic sequence to the life cycle, a series of stages or "seasons" as he calls them, which form an organic part of the total cycle, linking the past and future and containing both past and future within each season. Early adulthood, midlife, and late life each has characteristic ways in which the individual relates with himself and with other people.
There is also a basic sequence to the spiritual life, a series of stages with characteristic ways in which the individual relates with God and God with the individual. It was Meister Eckhart in the 14th century who wrote about three stages in the spiritual life cycle, based on what Jesus said to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel, "Follow me". Eckhart says that instead of following, there are some who "run in front of God", and these are the ones that Eckhart calls "the wicked". There are others who walk close by God, at his side, and these he calls "the imperfect". Finallythere are others who do in fact follow God, and "these are the perfect".
The people in the first stage of the spiritual life cycle are the ones that Eckhart says are "the wicked". He describes them as the kind of people who "never have any thought of God in their actions, who do not care or consider what is good or evil, pleasing to God or displeasing". Their only concern is to gratify their desires. Their behavior is evil, like the behavior of the people of Nineveh in the first reading. And yet this is not a stage before the beginning of the spiritual life, it is already the first stage of the spiritual life, and needs to be integrated as an essential part of our journey to God. God works with people even at this stage, as he showed by sending the prophet Jonah to the Ninevites. His attitude to our sin is like the Church’s attitude to the sin of Adam. During the Easter Vigil, the Church sings, "O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!" Our sins too can lead to the great grace of repentance. We learn by experience, as Dr. Bernard Nathanson did in performing so many abortions, that the paths we have taken do not lead to God. And then we discover, as he did, that we are not alone in the byways we have taken: God’s mercy pursues us even there, even in the abortuaries of our country, and leads us to life.
The next stage is when we walk close by God, at his side, and the people at this stage are not wicked, but they are still imperfect. Eckhart says that "these people do not follow God: they wish to lead God rather than be led by him." They would like God to want what they want. "Such as these," he says, "run in step with God and at his side. It is true that they want what God wants, but they would prefer God to want what they want". They are like the Corinthians in the second reading. They know they have to deal with the world, but they become engrossed in it, as if the world as we know it were going to last forever. God is part of their lives, but only in so far as he helps them live in this passing world. In effect, they want God to serve them instead of them serving God.
Finally, there are those whom Eckhart calls "the perfect". These are people who don’t run in front of God like the wicked, nor walk at his side like the imperfect, but actually do follow him, like the disciples in the Gospel today. They don’t look at anything behind them or anything beside them but only to God who is ahead of them. Unlike the imperfect, they’re not so much concerned to hear from God what they themselves want, as to want whatever they hear from God. They are like the disciples in the book of Revelation: "They follow the Lamb wherever he goes". They know what it means to be happy, because they only want what God wills or permits, and so they can be joyful whatever happens. God is himself their joy, and that is the whole goal of the spiritual life cycle: to rejoice in God.
