Two Sons: One Went; the Other Did Not

September 24, 1996

There is a story told of two young monks, climbing the hill toward their monastery on a cold winter's night. The wind was chilling and snow almost blinding. As they climbed, it became bitterly cold, and both grew alarmed about making it to the monastery alive. About halfway up the hill, the younger of the two stopped, as if he had heard a voice. "Do you hear that voice, crying for help?" he asked the other. "No," said the second, "it is just the howling of wind! We must keep moving, or we will freeze to death." But the younger monk motioned the other to go on, while he remained behind listening to the voice.

Sure enough, the younger monk had heard correctly, for not far away was an old man caught in the snow, pleading for his life. The young monk assisted him up, placed him on his shoulders, and covered the both of them with his own cloak. He then proceeded up the hill. As the young monk was about to enter the monastery, he saw the other monk dead on the wayside, covered with snow. He had almost made it to the top. The younger monk, because of the warmth of two bodies, was able to reach the top safely, and alive, carrying the load of the stranger.

Many years later, this younger monk was made the abbot of his community, and he became known for his wisdom and insights. When he was on his deathbed, the community gathered around for prayer. One of the monks asked him, "Father, what is the most tragic thing that could happen in this life of ours?" The abbot, remembering that night in the snow, smiled and said: "The most tragic thing that could happen in life is to live without having another person's burden to carry. One must be empty enough to be filled with the other." [1]

This story touches on the gospel today. There we see two brothers: one said "yes" when his father asked him to go and work in the field; the other said "no," but then he went and did as his father had asked.

The young monk in our story was not worried so much about getting back to the monastery, even though he had probably taken a vow not to be outside of the monastery after a certain hour. No, his main concern was action, taking care of an old man who was freezing. The other monk, who went ahead and did not help out, later was found dead.

The point seems to be that action is the most important thing in our behavior. We have all made promises that we later thought better of and did not keep. Maybe we are guilty...or maybe we had such a good reason for not keeping that promise that we would have been guiltier in keeping it. For not keeping the promise would have taken us away from a serious act of charity done for someone in great need.

We often readily give lip service to the principles of Christianity, such as service, caring for the homeless, self denial. But the doing is always the proof of the pudding.

"For three decades, author Jonathan Kozol has been plumbing the depths of poor inner city neighborhoods and the children who live there. He says, "The ghettos serve a very important function for the privileged. If there was no ghetto...the rich and the privileged would have to look into the eyes of the poor every day.

"In the early and mid 1980s, thousands of families became homeless in New York... Inevitably these people walked the streets and stood outside the restaurants and theaters. The civic boosters of the city were alarmed... The last thing the theater owners wanted was to have a wealthy couple spend $200 to the Broadway play 'Les Miserables' and then come out from the theater and see the real thing!

"I walked by that theater sometimes and would notice people who had presumably been weeping for the poor children in Paris a few minutes before in the theater; now, coming out on the street, they were miserably offended by the sight of people begging on the sidewalk." [2]

This is somewhat like the story of the rich lady in the eighteenth century who sat in her opera box weeping at what was going in the play on stage while her coachman sat outside in the freezing weather, waiting to pick her up after the show.

Our words come easily, then, but actions prove what we say we believe. Pastor William Willimon says, "A few years ago I was leading a discussion about preaching among a group of lay persons in an affluent Washington, D.C. parish.

'"What do you look for in a sermon?' I asked.

"Immediately, one of the group members said, '"I want a sermon which helps me to think about things in a new way.'

"Everyone in the group nodded in agreement. That's the goal of preaching, to describe the gospel in some interesting and engaging new way, to help us to think new thoughts and explore new ideas.

"All of that sounded good to me at the time. Yet over the years, the more I have thought about preaching, the less I like it as a test for good preaching. 'A sermon which helps me to think about things in a new way.' "Such a test can be an evasion of the sermon rather than a mark of a good sermon. Isn't that the way we love to deal with things? We love to think about things, to run them over in our minds, then to go home and have a good lunch? We can then think, or feel, but never need to act.

"A good sermon," pastor Willimon says, "ought to help me to act on things in a new way." [3]

C.S. Lewis said, "A person cannot remain just a 'good egg' forever. Either one must hatch or rot."

Sometimes we think our credentials can stand in place of our actions. Fr. Dick Rice is a noted counselor of priests and nuns in the archdiocese of St. Paul Minneapolis. He was giving a day of recollection to Mother Teresa and some nuns. He said, "Mother, what is, would you say, your most difficult problem?" Immediately, he felt he shouldn't have asked the question.

But Mother Teresa came right back and said, "Professionalism." Fr. Rice blinked and repeated "Professionalism?" "Yes," said Mother Teresa. "When I send a sister off to school to become a nurse or a doctor, she returns with her degrees and diplomas, I always have to interrupt her after a while in her work. She has become too intellectual about her work. She has lost the personal touch. So I send her down to the ward where we have people with advanced diseases who are dying. I tell her to just sit with them, empty their bedpans, hold their hand, feed them. Then, after a couple of months I let her go back to her work."

If anyone is a no nonsense person, it's Mother Teresa. In her reply she showed how important it is not to lose the common touch, no matter how many degrees one has after his or her name.

Some people substitute hanging onto their old ways of practicing their religion as God's will. They think that God never intended any change to affect the Church. But Pope John XXIII called the church to change in the second Vatican Council. And today the saintly leader of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who has inoperable cancer, has just called for a meeting next spring of many theologians, men and women, and other people to talk about what's happening in the church today.

Such a common ground of talk has been criticized even by some of Bernardin's fellow members of the hierarchy, who say that once the church has spoken, we don't need to discuss anything. Everything is set in concrete once the Church, Holy Scriptures, and Tradition have spoken, they say.

But the Holy Spirit speaks through the grassroots also. It's a source of revelation called "sensus fidelium," or "the sense of the faithful," and it is not to be ignored.

Many referendums have been taken in recent years in Europe. In Austria and Germany last year some 2.5 million signatures are urging genuine dialogue in the whole church concerning certain issues. Signature sheets are being distributed throughout the United States by volunteers. People are asked to sign "with prayerful hope for a new movement of the Spirit in our church."

Organizers plan to take the results to the Vatican next year. Main points are:

  1. Equality of the faithful and the right of a community to participate in selecting pastors and bishops;
  2. equal rights for women, including ordination;
  3. optional celibacy for priests;
  4. affirmation of the goodness of sexuality combined with a shift of emphasis from sexual morality to other essential issues, such as peace, social justice, and the environment; and
  5. a generous and welcoming spirit that affirms people rather than condemning them for following their conscience in such areas as divorce or theological debate."

It is important to note that no one expects the church to change overnight as a result of popular demand but rather, that those in charge of decision making should not simply close the door but continue to explore those issues in careful dialogue with many constituencies. Petition signers are in good company. The church must heed the signs of the times. Cardinal Martini of Milan has suggested we need another ecumenical council to deal with women's ordination. Bishop Reinhold Stecher of Innsbruck where the entire movement originated officially requested that Rome consider the ordination of women to the deaconate and the ordination of married men to the priesthood. Theologian Hans Kung said that the petition drive "reminds us of the original freedom of early Christianity and does an immense service for the Church in this difficult period of transition." [4]

Vaclav Havel, the head of Czechoslovakia, said, "The worst thing is that we are living in a decayed moral environment. We have become morally ill because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, not to care about one another and only to look after ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility and forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension, and for many, they represent merely some kind of psychological idiosyncrasy, or appear as some kind of stray relic from times past, something rather comical in the era of computers and space rockets." [5]

The story of the two brothers is very central for us today. We must not get caught up in our head, in giving assent to principles that we have long since ceased to believe, to put into action.

"In his autobiography, __Telling Secrets,_ Frederick Buechner tells the story of an evening visiting his mother in Manhattan. she had prepared and was serving a gourmet meal for her visiting son when the phone rang. A friend was on the line. He asked Buechner to come wait with him at the airport. This friends' family had been seriously injured in an accident, and he was waiting for a flight to join them.

"When Buechner's mother learned of this request, she was furious. the meal was ready and was getting cold. She called him a fool for thinking about ruining a rare evening together for such a ridiculous reason. Buechner says, "And for a moment I was horrified to find myself thinking that maybe she was right. Then the next moment I saw more clearly than I ever had before that it is on just such outwardly trivial decisions as this should I go or should I stay that human souls are saved or lost.'" [6]