by Father Richard Cipolla
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body.”
This whole passage is the most Franciscan passage in the New Testament: the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, the natural way to live, natural trust in God to provide. But Jesus is not a romantic, he is not a 60s hippie preaching flower power.
He is not advocating laziness or idleness, and we must know this, for we know that if we do not work, when tomorrow comes we will not eat unless someone who has worked has made it possible for us to have something to eat. This passage is difficult for us to understand, because we revolt against what sounds like a romantic picture of life. For we know what it takes to live, we know that there are those who starve every day in places that are ravaged by nature’s dark side of drought, pestilence and famine. When I hear the phrase “lilies of the field”, given my age and generation, I think of a nice movie with Sidney Poitier with nuns swaying back and forth singing, Amen, Amen-- Which has nothing to do with us.
Now although Mammon is a semitic word that means money or riches in the worldly sense, it is good to keep this strange word, because it means more: it is broader, it is archaic, which is a good thing in this case. No one can serve two masters. Jesus’ insight is important here. Man will serve, whether he wants to or not. That is the human condition. I will choose in my life some ultimate thing or person or god whom I choose to serve and then act accordingly. This is true of the rich and powerful as it is of the poor and hungry. I can choose to serve Mammon and worship him in return for my servitude. I will enjoy a comfortable life, a life full of material benefits that make my life comfortable and for those around me. What this means is that I give Mammon my trust, no matter what I say about my religious self. I rely in the end on Mammon, my trust is there, and I work as much as I can to achieve this goal that Mammon can give: security against the rainy day, enough money to provide freedom from anxiety for tomorrow, the best things for my family to make them happy. All this in servitude to Mammon. And this form of servitude is applauded by the world. For this is the mark of the go-getter, this is the mark of the responsible adult taking care of their family, this is the mark of the prudent person looking to his or her retirement.
The contrast is to serve God. And what this means is to trust God that he will give us whatever we truly need, that as a loving Father he will never abandon us, that we need to open our eyes and look around us at the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, who are not anxious about tomorrow amd do what they have to do today. Does this mean that those who serve God should live a bohemian life and glorify Jack Kerouac and the Woodstock generation? Is Jesus encouraging idleness? Not at all. For if one watches birds, one sees that they are always working, always doing something, eating constantly, livingevery day, on their way to someplace else, as pilgrims on their way, but yet living with no anxiety about tomorrow, for they assume that there will be something to eat, they assume that they will manage to live until they die, and that’s it.
But, you say, we are not birds. We are rational human beings who know what we have to do and how to do it. Work is how to achieve the goal of a comfortable life, and so wok we must, even if work occupies almost all of our time so that we have little time for family and friends and leisure and prayer and all those good things. But the problem is not work. The problem is as Jesus tells us that you cannot serve both masters. This is not how man was created. We have only so much energy, both physical and spiritual, and we cannot serve both maters. It is one or the other. And the fact is, the obvious fact is that when we serve Mammon-- and one cannot doubt that this is a mammonistic society-- anxiety about tomorrow does not vanish, for there is never enough money to quell that nagging doubt, to fill the empty hole, to stop the churning. We live in this mammonistic society that is riddled with anxiety, a society that drugs itself either legally or illegally, a society that pays indiscriminately for multiple therapies in order to heal the disorder of our lives, the anxiety about tomorrow, not only our tomorrow but the tomorrow of our children, the tomorrow of the world, the tomorrow of existence.
What a waste of time, says Jesus! Again, not a waste of time to work and to be prudent and to provide for one’s family. But a waste of time to put one’s heart and soul into accumulating wealth as insurance against tomorrow, for tomorrow will ultimately bring our death, the pilgrimage is over, and we will live in eternity with the god we gave ourselves to here on earth. Service to mammon is a terrible illusion, for Mammon can do nothing about natural disasters, can do nothing about sudden illness that results in death, can do nothing about heartache and sorrow and the mess that the world is in. But loving service to God can and did and does do something about all of this, and that something is the cross of Jesus Christ that took the suffering and death of all of us for all time and transformed it into life, everlasting life of joy and peace. This is the context of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. No romanticism here, just the saving agony of the Cross, pro nobis, for us. For it is salvation that is the gift from God, a gift that is eternal and has nothing to do with worldly success.
There is another reason among many other reasons to love the Traditional Roman Mass. For here we truly play in the fields of the Lords like the birds of the air. There is no earthly goal to this Mass where the priest throws smoke at a stone altar, and we sing Latin chant and hear the silence of God in the Canon of the Mass and receive the bread of angels. This Mass does not exist to make the world a better place, or to make you or me comfortable or to formulate a plan for tomorrow What we do here is to enter into eternity to worship God, and in this worshipthat demands a letting-go of ourselves we learn to trust despite ourselves. Here we get a glimpse of the life of a lily and the soaring song of the bird. And let us not forget this when we leave this church, for to forget this is a terrible thing indeed for it to forget the source of our life and hope who is the Master we must truly serve.
