10.17.2020 Homily

The Pharisees continued to try to trap Jesus. They continued to try to get Him to say something that they can hold against Him. Now the difficulty with the Pharisees is they are really wed to binary thinking. A thing must be good, or it must be bad. A thing must be right, or it must be wrong. A thing must be something we do or something we avoid, exclusively seeing the world as black and white. So do we pay the tax or don't we pay the tax?
If Jesus says don't pay the tax, then He offends the civil authority. And if Jesus says, do pay the tax, then He offends some of His own people who really resent having to pay that tax. They tried to put Jesus in an impossible situation and He won't have any of it. 
You see, the problem is that being aware of something is not the same thing as thinking. We think our way through things, but awareness has to do with what's inside us. Awareness has to do with what's in our spirit. And most of things in life are not black and white. Most of things in life admit of great complexity. So how do I hold all of that together? How do I keep all of that without driving me crazy? 
Well, one of the great mystics of the church, Saint Teresa of Avila, said, "I have come to realize by experience, that thinking is not the same thing as awareness. I had not been able to understand why? If my mind is one of the faculties of the soul, yet it is sometimes restless--thoughts fly around so fast that only God can anchor them. It was driving me crazy to see the faculties of my soul calmly absorbed in the remembrance of God, while my thoughts on the other hand were wildly agitated. Now, when the Buddhists think about this issue, they think about the thoughts and they call it ‘monkey mind.’ "
The issue is not thoughts. The knowledge and the truth that Jesus invites us to is a truth of knowing in the heart, a truth of being at peace with the fact of who God is and who I am to God. The fact of being in right relationship with God that allows me then to be in right relationship with others. And what it does is it allows us to take the complexities of life and hold on to them, even though we can't sort them out. 

And it will not drive us nuts, we'll know that that's just the reality. And the reality is terribly complex. And I am not one who is able to sort it out. So I'm just going to hold it. I'm just going to let it be. I'm just going to be at peace. There are so many ways in which our lives are turned upside down by all kinds of images and thoughts and reasons that we end up being frustrated. We end up being anxious. And that gets us nowhere.
And most of it is because we have an either/or approach to life rather than a both/and. The morality of the church, the teaching of the church around human action is really not an either/or teaching. It really is a both/and teaching. And how do we hold the seemingly contradictory, but not the seemingly contradictory elements together and not allow it to destroy us? 
Well, we pray that the Lord might grant us that gift and that we in our own lives might practice the quietness, the meditativeness, the slowness, the emptying our thoughts, and allowing us just to be aware. Aware of what is going on around me, that I don't have to sort it out. 
But it's important that I be aware, that I be sensitive, that I be accepting. And that I know that some place in all of that is found God.