Perfect

For the past two months we have been preparing a large field for planting part of our Turmeric crop (called Olena in Polynesia). We live in jungle conditions with rapidly growing vegetation nearly everywhere. Several years ago, we worked full-time for six months just to push the jungle back off of the Farm we manage. It is nothing to remove eight cubic yards of weeds from a single planting field.

As I watch the Sisters, now in the their late seventies, bent over day-after-day for months on end, working in the Polynesian heat, I think of the life of poverty they have chosen. They pull away at the stubborn weeds and vines and dig into the ground to find all the roots. Their joints ache at the end of the day though they do not complain. I see them stretching their cramping hands and joints when they think no one is looking. They could be living in relative ease at this stage in their lives, but they have chosen intentional poverty to the end. If they were to receive salaries, which they do not, these would fall far below the legal wage. One Sister, who has worked fifty-hour weeks for half-a-century, has personally never received a dime .... though a wealthy man once gave her a million dollars, so she could continue her work to relieve suffering among the world's poorest people.

In an age when the worldwide web abounds with blogs offering self-help advice, people are apt to view religious life through the lens of self-improvement. Yes, religious vows are called "counsels of perfection," but not that kind of perfection. Intentional poverty is not a diet. It cannot be found among the ten habits of successful people. The Sisters live out their poverty simply because it is the Master's command:

This Divine command issued to a young ruler is not an isolated incident. It echoes throughout the Gospels:

And again,

And again,

And again,

The Lord Jesus Christ does not say (as we so often attribute to Him),

He says,

Do you see? Jesus' Disciples who have become impoverished by serving the poor (for this is what happens) and, He blesses them, .... rejoicing! Levi-Matthew, the Roman patrician with his costly estate; Simon-Peter, the fisherman who owned a boat and a thriving fish business; James & John, born into wealth; .... and all the others. They have become poor. And Jesus declares, taking satisfaction, "Yours is the Kingdom of God."

Years ago when we were Franciscans, I lamented to a Sister of this Community in my exhaustion, "We do not know where our next dollar will come from. We have poured out everything we have, even every hour of every day, in service .... nothing but sacrifice and service. And these same people we have served .... hate us! ... have even physically attacked us." She permitted silence to have its say, so I could hear what I had just said. And then she replied, "Saint Francis would look around all this — our poverty, our exhaustion, and the hatred we face — and say, 'Perfect!'"

We must go slow here and reflect, for this is not the "perfect" we so often use, which might follow the first bite of a specially prepared meal or crown our entrance into a destination resort.

The Greek original is τελειοσ (teleios) meaning "to arrive to full maturity." Its root word is τελοσ (telos) which refers to the blueprint set down within us at conception. That is, within each of us is a fully realized, multi-faceted plan — the fullgrown, sturdy oak inscribed within the acorn or the soaring eagle encoded within the albumen of its egg.

Of particular interest to Jesus is another, higher kind of telos, which is the fully-developed son or daughter of God inscribed within each one of us. This is the blueprint Jesus came into the world to heal.

The holy Father St. Irenaeus wrote that God created male and female not as already-mature adults but as newborn children. Their vocation was to grow into the fullness of God's Image. Upon arriving to maturity, they would have received everything that was God's to give including the knowledge of good and evil. But Eve in her impulsiveness wanted this power before she was mature enough to wield it. This was the fall from grace: arrogating to a fullness of judgment and authority that was not yet hers to exercise. The sin here is a failure of patience and trust.

As a consequence, the blueprint within was ordered no longer to the Kingdom of Heaven, but to the House of Death. With the Incarnation of Jesus, with His Divine Person touching our lifeworld, a shock of cosmic dimensions convulsed the Earth flipping our telos from death back to life (to borrow St. Athanasius' conception). This was the mission His Father sent Him to accomplish .... and one more thing: to model Divine maturity, where Adam and Eve had stumbled, completing the process of human creation. Finally, human beings could see what they were created to be: the Son of Man and of God, the endpoint and perfection of our adoption by God. And what did this example look like precisely? He was a child of the poor, rejected by the wealthy and the comfortable on the night of His birth. He was the infant who entered His own Creation midst dung-stained hay. He was the Son of Man Who had nowhere to lay His head. He was the King of Glory Who had emptied Himself and was indistinguishable from a nameless servant hanging on a Cross. This is perfection: self-sacrifice, exhaustion, poverty.

The Disciples cry out in disbelief:

Would-be disciples today are apt to sound these same tones. Like the rich, young ruler of our Gospel lesson, they are apt to walk away. "What?! Give up my luxurious lifestyle?! The fees for joining this club are too steep!" But to say so would focus the entire question of life and its meaning upon our self-indulgence, as if the pursuit of happiness and pleasure were the purpose of Christian life. But Christian life is not about us, in this sense. The world suffers. Relatively few are comfortable. And as we speak, the gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States has become a gaping ravine, the widest (by far) in U.S. history. Billionaires plan trips to Mars while our cities begin to fill with the homeless and the starving.

Speaking globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty (that is, living on less than $1.90 a day according to the World Bank), is roughly 800 million people. That's more than twice the population of the United States. 811 million people go to bed hungry every night.

When I decided to go to Haiti, people wondered what I was doing. Why would I leave the beautiful Maine coast? Why would I give up my career as a theology professor and parish priest? Why would anyone want to live amidst starvation, disease, and death, for that is the life of Haiti, everywhere in Haiti.

But the plain truth is, I felt a great relief wash over me as I sat in a little airport midst the ruin of Port-au-Prince. For the great lie had finally ended. Too many suffer, and now (for me), life had begun, for I was among the suffering and no longer staring from a comfortable distance .... however compassionate I thought that I might be. Finally, I had stopped living the lie of my Christian life (though I was a priest) and threw my lot in with the least among us. I felt a great comfort in seeing the living saints practicing their daily, humble lives, especially the women who had given their lives to this work at age eighteen and were now nearly eighty. And one more comfort: I knew that I would never leave. It would be here where I would die and be buried.

For a time, I was obliged to travel back and forth to the States, for university commitments are not measured in weeks but in semesters. Moreover, the Franciscan ministry I served required me to travel as I purchased needed supplies and recruited key technical people to help solve problems like electricity and photovoltaics. My friends in Maine would say, "Oh, my! Soon you will have to go back to that place!" But I would hold my peace, for I did not see it that way. The truth was, I dreaded leaving Haiti and returning to the States. That was the hard burden to bear. For the longer I lived in these two worlds, the more disgusted I became at every first-world problem: teenagers acting out because they did not have the latest smart phone; neighbors debating over the best restaurants in town; my own realization that my property tax could build sixteen very nice homes for Haitian families every year, a small village in a decade. Humanitarian physician Paul Farmer wrote, "If only I could capture the money Americans spend grooming their dogs each year, I could solve every problem in Haiti!" I began to share his perspective, horrified whenever I heard of someone's dog receiving costly surgery. A dog?! The same money could feed an orphanage for months!

If Christianity is about compassion and kindness, if it is the "love religion," as so many people tell me, then it is not tenable to turn our backs on the poor and the suffering. Otherwise, we live out a farce. Indeed, we live in rebellion against God Whose deepest heart belongs to the poor.

As for turning the question of life upon ourselves, St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain wrote,

This is intentional poverty — a process of stripping the corruptions of the world off of ourselves, like weeding a planting field, even four cubic yards a day so that tender green shoots might rise above the refuse of our selfish natures and stand in the sun coming to full stature, even the stature of the Son of God. This is Christianity: beginning with adoption and then living a life worthy of that name.

"Be perfect!" Jesus says in the Greek sense. Or, as we would translate accurately today, "Grow up!"

The world does not begin and end here. Its source and destination is the Kingdom of God, and never forget the heart of the Lord Jesus. His angels weep for the poor. And this is not your home. Far from it. Keep your eyes fixed above: to your eternal home and to the tender heart of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.