“My grace is enough for you.”
Most of us know the old definition
of an “expert”: anyone who comes from more than fifty miles away. By
now, the requirement must be five hundred miles. We seem to have a problem with
closeness, with the ordinary, with the everyday.
Expertise is most respected when it comes from a distance. Prophetic gifts as
well. Prophets are best when they are far away and long ago. Here and now is
a different story. “Surely she cannot be a prophet. I went to school with
her.” “He cannot prophesy; I know his mother.” “That guy
cannot be a source of grace and joy to others; I’ve been with him in community
for years. He tells terrible jokes and wears cufflinks.” Is this why no
one is a hero to one’s own valet?
We reject not only the prophets around us. We reject the prophet within. This
is the repression of the prophetic and heroic impulse of that person who is most
ordinary and familiar to us: one’s very self.
Since we are most often our own valets, most often familiar to ourselves, we
are skeptical of the possibility that we ourselves could be prophetic or heroic.
We leave little room for prophecy in the spaces closest and most intimate to
us. Thus, there is little room for the miracles of faith. “No prophet is
without honor except in that person’s native land. Jesus could work no miracle
there, apart from a few, so much did their lack of faith distress him.”
In the tradition of so many other reluctant prophets, we use our proximity to
ourselves as our excuse. “I am too young, too unprepared, too old, too weak
and sinful, too busy and preoccupied, too homely, too nice. If only I could fly
to a far-off place and some other time, in disguise, armed with stirring rhetoric
and bright virtue. If only I could seize the pulpit or get the ear of the bishop,
or be a holy subversive in the college of cardinals. Then, then I could prophesy.”
But not here. Not now. Not me.
The reason we reject our own heroic and prophetic possibilities, if we are honest
with ourselves, is that we know how weak and inadequate we are. Surely a hero
cannot be lurking behind such common talent, such ordinary appearance. Surely
a prophet’s life is not marked by failures and frailties such as ours.
St. Paul, it seems, was also hounded by the thought of his inadequacy. He beggedthree
timesthat God would remove the “thorn in his flesh.” The prayer
seems not to have been answered.
But if, like him, we learn to be “content with our weakness, for the sake
of Christ,” we may one day find ourselves unleashed, our hearts emboldened,
our words firm and free.
“For when I am powerless, it is then that I am strong.” If that is
the case, all prophecy, like all politics, is local.
John Kavanaugh, S. J.
|
Father
Kavanaugh was a professor of Philosophy at
St.
Louis University in St. Louis.
His untimely death is a grief for the many people he reached during his lifetime.
Copyright ©
1998 by John F. Kavanaugh. All rights
reserved.
Used by permission from Orbis Books,
Maryknoll, New York 10545-0308
THE WORD EMBODIED:
Meditations on the Sunday Scriptures
Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York (1996), pp. 84-85.
To purchase or learn more about other books
written by Fr. Kavanaugh,
go to http://www.maryknollmall.org/ and
type "Kavanaugh" next to the "SEARCH"
button
Art by Martin Erspamer, O.S.B.
from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical
Year (A, B, and C).
Used by permission of Liturgy Training
Publications. This art may be reproduced only
by parishes who purchase the collection in book
or CD-ROM form. For more information go to:
http://www.ltp.org/
|