A Reflection for the Feast of St. James, Apostle
Find today’s readings here.
“When the Lord brought back the captives of Zion,
we were like men dreaming.”
“Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.”
To reap rejoicing, those who sow tears must first learn how to cry.
There is a joke somewhere in St. James, referred to at times as James, the Greater, being the subject of Jesus’s lesson to the other apostles on this contradictory path to sitting at his right hand: “Whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.”
The modifier “greater,” of course, only refers to St. James’ age, or perhaps size, and is in no way a ranking of the man above his peers. The joke, to me, is this brief contradiction between the lesson and the man’s title, and it is not too funny. It produces, at most, a louder exhale from my nose than normal.
Contradictions—rich and strange—and that alchemy of laughter which brings about exhale, snort or guffaw are documented elsewhere in today’s readings, in Psalm 126.
Their mouths filled with laughter, those Israelites delivered from Babylonian exile, “were like men dreaming.” Their hymn recounts their path from oppression to a harvest of joy. They sowed tears, and they reaped rejoicing in the delirium of relief, of returning home. This was a lesson in despair and deliverance–in that bittersweet alchemy–which I did not understand in the smaller contexts of my own life for a long time.
It has always been difficult for me to admit when I am hurt. I did not feel the need to mention the scrapes on my knees from the playground blacktop when I returned home from grammar school in the afternoons. Once, as a child, I tried to hide a broken foot that kept me in a cast for two months.
Most recently, in the mire of the Covid-19 pandemic’s isolations, I hid a struggle with depression and tremendous self-doubt that reverberated through the years since. Sparing details I could fashion a book from: I was frozen in myself, failing university coursework, hiding from my loved ones and lying about it all.
In covering my tracks, I was denying myself the opportunity to weep. I was not, as today’s Psalm assures us is good practice, sowing my tears in any soil. My sense of this old denial washed over me at my first encounter with the captives singing “they were like men dreaming.” This surreal experience of finding, at last, solace in God’s rewards for those patient with life’s contradictions moved me to recall my own sense of feeling like man dreaming when I owned up to my own failures and dishonesties. When I shared what I had kept hidden with my family, when I first learned to cry, I sowed the tears which grew and opened into a world of help—the joys of which make me laugh.
Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians also contains the strange spark of laughter, held in deep Faith. Between afflictions and persecutions, Paul affirms that we are not constrained or destroyed in the transcendence of the Body and Blood. But I would like to return to Saint James and today’s Gospel.
Beheaded in Jerusalem, his remains in Northwest Spain the destination of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year, time has proven the apostle charted Jesus’s contradictory path to greatness in the Kingdom. From a terrible death, through the mysteries of the historical accounts and Galician folklore, James the Greater has surely evangelized countless Christians over the centuries on their paths to Santiago de Compostela—a dream of a harvest.
In my case, greatness is about plain honesty and affection between me and those who love me, rather than the evangelizing power of Jacobean legend. This harvest will come again, and we will be like men dreaming and laughing should we open our arms to the highs and lows ahead.
