A Homily for the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7a James 2:1-5 Mark 7:31-37
It is a town in France. Almost everyone can tell you that much. And even those who know little about the First World War have come to associate the name “Verdun” with incalculable carnage.
Fought from February into December of 1916, Verdun was the longest battle of the war and one of the costliest in human history. Between them, the Germans and the French suffered more than 700,000 casualties, about 70,000 a month.
Though he was already a Jesuit and a priest, Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., the paleontologist and theologian who is now celebrated for his writings linking evolution to Christ, served at Verdun as a stretcher-bearer. France drafted even priests during the First World War. If they were not needed as chaplains, they were assigned noncombatant duties.
Make no mistake: This did not mean secondhand war, especially when the greatest terror came from the often relentless shelling of the lines. Without warning you could be killed where you stood.
Medical orderlies were also sent “over the top,” out into no-man’s land. Indeed, Father de Chardin was repeatedly cited for bravery. After the war, at the request of his regiment, Father de Chardin was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. His citation read:
An outstanding stretcher-bearer, who during four years of active service, was in every battle and engagement the regiment took part in, applying to remain in the ranks in order that he might be with the men, whose dangers and hardships he constantly shared.
Father de Chardin would later record that his worst fears came not in battle but when he had time to reflect, when the guns and shelling fell silent. For him and for many others, fear fell away in the battle itself. Under fire he felt curiously alive, charged with purpose. In a 1915 letter to his cousin, he explained:
There’s no doubt about it: the only man who knows [who experiences] right in the innermost depths of his being the weight and grandeur of war, is the man who goes over the top with bayonet and grenade. In that moment training, of course, and a sort of intoxication play a large part; but even so it is still true that the infantryman leaving his trench for the attack is a man apart, a man who has lived a minute of life of which other men have simply no conception at all.
That “minute of life” was not something the soldier sought, but whatever his previous expectations, it profoundly and permanently changed him.
After the war, Father de Chardin tried to explain the clarity that came over one who had experienced such a moment. In a work entitled Nostalgia for the Front, he recounts cutting across a field on his way back to the trenches. He was upbraided by a peasant who had just plowed the land. Father de Chardin wrote:
The fellow was perfectly justified. But as I listened to him, I felt an inner shock, a dizziness, as though I were falling from a great height…. To all appearances we were similar beings, he and I. We used the same words; but he was imprisoned in what concerned him as an individualistic “man of the soil”—and I was living the life of the Front. Who has not experienced, when he has been on leave, again among persons and things that greet him just as before that melancholy feeling of being a stranger, someone out of scale, as though between the others and himself a deep rift had been produced, visible only from one side—and that side not theirs.
One moment, and everything about the world—one’s place in it, one’s hopes and fears—changes. You remain in the world with others, but you no longer dwell in the same world.
Jesus heals “a deaf man who had a speech impediment” (Mk 7:32), but if that was all that he did, there would be no Gospel to proclaim. From the beginning, the church has understood Christ’s physical healings to be mere points of entry for the radical change that Christ offers to each of us. One event, one encounter or one relationship can change everything about the world. “The infantryman leaving his trench for the attack is a man apart, a man who has lived a minute of life of which other men have simply no conception at all.”
We do not see the grace, the radical change, coming, though in some cases we recognize the earthly vessel. The world changes when one falls in love, when a child is born, when a lifelong friend comes our way. It alters as well with a divorce, a terrible diagnosis or an accident. The moment masters us because we are not prepared for it, because we could not have envisioned it and because everything is transformed in its wake. “As though between the others and himself a deep rift had been produced.”
With reflection, we realize that we have encountered in such moments the deepest meaning of the word “God,” the depth of a vast, hidden world rising to grasp us.
And sometimes there is no earthly vessel. Only a grace, filling the silence. No one can see what happens to us in prayer, and we would be hard pressed to explain it to another.
What can you say when the world does not change yet everything within the world is suddenly altered? Being a poet and a prophet, Isaiah put it as well as anyone could:
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
the ears of the deaf be cleared;
then will the lame leap like a stag,
then the tongue of the mute will sing (35:4-6).
One moment and the world changes. Hard to believe until it happens, and then impossible to doubt.
