Sand and rock

Today’s gospel:

Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house. 
But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock. 
And everyone who listens to these words of mine
but does not act on them
will be like a fool who built his house on sand. 
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house. 
And it collapsed and was completely ruined.

If you go to the Badlands of South Dakota, as we did back in 2019, you might be awed and startled by the startling lunar-like landscape. You also might expect to spend time hiking and climbing on some solid rock.

You won’t.

Oh, you can hike and climb all you want, of course. There are few trails and it’s open hiking. You can walk anywhere.

Why?

Because it’s crumbling. That’s it’s nature. It’s not solid rock, it’s more like huge piles of sand, constantly eroding, collapsing and tumbling away. Your footsteps won’t matter much in that millienia-long process.

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The difference between solid and fragile can be difficult to discern, not just in geology, but in the spiritual life. Of course. That’s why discernment is an essential and challenging aspect of spiritual growth. Because it’s not obvious.

I’m seeing a lot of that these days, it seems, as expressed in life online.

A dawning awareness, sometimes painful, that the prosperity gospel (for that is what it is) of “fulfillment” and contentment in following one’s dreams and emotional highs aren’t actually necessary signs of authentic spirituality, and to build one’s house on them can lead to a collapse when suffering hits and sacrifice – yes, of our “dreams” – is required by agape and justice. Moreover, the awareness that this 21st century western prosperity gospel that permits (and encourages) us to keep living our lifestyle and just love ourselves as we are would be…completely…unfamiliar to the great spiritual teachers of Catholicism. That’s a little unsettling to discover.

The very painful awareness of the failures of the institutional Church at every level, all the time.

The awareness of the failures of the non-institutional Church lived out in full glory in opportunists from all sides, seeking little but profit from all kinds of currencies.

Breaking out of insular religious ideologies – of all stripes – with the discovery of complexity and the awareness that the simplistic formulas that took you so far just don’t seem to hold up.

So how do you tell? Especially when what has been presented to you as rock turns out to be sand?

I don’t have an easy answer for that, only a simple one.

If that makes sense.

Go back up to that Gospel and read the first part. Listen. And then keep listening, and – this is maybe the most important part – don’t stop listening. Don’t talk yourself into moving over to that other hill over there and start building, having convinced yourself that he didn’t really mean that. It’s fine.