A Reflection from Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
We humans long to belong: to someone, to something, to someplace. We are tribal by nature. While the technological conventions of modern life may contribute to us feeling isolated or lonesome, even our tech usage reflects our yearning to belong: I’m thinking of how we send off our DNA swabs to discover other people we might be related to. Even online, we search for family, for connection, for where we fit.
Our need for a sense of belonging figures in today’s reading from the first letter to the church at Corinth. St. Paul admonishes the Corinthians to remember exactly who they belong to as spiritual people: not to Paul, not to Apollos, but to God. Predating the French saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” the letter indicates that the early church was not so different from the church today. Today, though, instead of saying “I belong to Paul” or “I belong to Apollos,” we say “I belong to Father Mike,” or “I belong to the 9 AM Mass.” We don’t use those exact words, but we want to worship where we feel we belong. We may stay away from a parish because of a perceived liberal bias or an overly traditional approach. We may only go to a certain Mass because we like the priest or the music or the length of the liturgy.
I am guilty of the above behavior. I attend a parish where I’m pretty confident the homilies will not make me get up and leave. I’m not afraid of new pastoral faces, but as the parent of a trans adult, I’m sensitive to transphobia. In my version of “I belong to Apollos,” I belong to any homilist who preaches the holy mission and grace of Jesus.
Choosing where to belong may seem like a case of “you-say-potato,” but St. Paul emphasizes that our human factionalism is not of God. We may prefer to stick within our comforting microcosm of the universal church, but we—I—should be mindful of today’s stern and timely caution from St. Paul, planter of seeds in God’s garden: “Therefore, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who causes the growth” (1 Cor 3:7). In other words, although we choose which spiritual community to join and support, we really all belong, only and completely, to God.
