Mass of Thanksgiving at Jesuit College Preparatory, Dallas, Texas
Red alert! I can hear Captain Picard alerting the crew of the Enterprise to the danger that the warp engines are about to spew anti-matter and disrupt the time-space continuum. Our strengths can so often become our greatest vulnerability or be the source of our biggest temptations. For Saint Bonaventure, his great intellect presented a temptation to lose perspective on the importance of the mystical in his life and yet he was able to hold on to both. In the first reading, success can lead to excessive pride that we have accomplished something on our owns and we can too easily push God out of the picture with disastrous consequences and so to maintain balance we are called to be humble and to rely on God. In the Gospel, Jesus invites us to come to him to rest, to take his yoke upon our shoulders, to learn from Him. The danger here is that we might think that relying on Jesus means that we are off the hook. As though we should just kick back and lower our expectations. Red alert, our taking on the yoke of Christ does not mean that our expectations are lowered, quite the contrary. Our hopes are raised as we yearn for more out of life precisely because God's desires and God's love for us, exceeds our own love and desires we have for ourselves. Through our participation in Mass, we nurture a healthy and balanced perspective, one that thrives and is fueled by the tension between faith and reason, one that allows us to celebrate what God is doing through us, and one that strengthens us to be and to accomplish more by inviting Christ to share in our labors and our burdens. As in the warp engines, it is the tensions in our lives that often provide the fuel necessary to move us forward as a community toward the Kingdom of God. The tension between mysticism and systematic thought, the tension between faith and works, the tension between reality and hope. May we be given the wisdom and courage to embrace the tensions in our lives so that they do not tear us apart but rather help us to grow closer to God and to one another so that we might be willing to sacrifice anything for Christ but never sacrifice Christ for anything. In doing so, we take on the yoke of Christ and learn from Him.
