The Holy "Village Idiot"

 St. John Vianney (1786 - 1869)

"Among the other priests, I am like the village idiot; but when I think how the good Lord has taken care of me, I am altogether beside myself..."

In sending John Vianney, who had barely passed his ordination exams, to the backwater parish at an insignificant town of about 250 people, Ars-en-Dombes, the Vicar-General of the Diocese of Lyons challenged St. John: "There is not much love for God in that parish; you will bring some into it."  Not long after he arrived, a 5 ft. 2 in. skinny man, with thick glasses, clad in a threadbare cassock (which he wore for his whole ministry) and wearing rough peasant shoes, the mayor of the town exclaimed: "We have a poor church, but now we have a holy priest!"

Within 27 years of his arrival at Ars in 1818, as many as 300 people per day were coming to hear him preach and to receive confessional absolution from the famous Curé d'Ars.  Personally, he lived an extremely ascetic life: getting by on four hours' sleep, wearing a hairshirt, privately using a scourge, and existing on one daily meal of potatoes.  By today's standards, he would be considered a very "conservative" pastor, railing against dancing, immodesty, blasphemy, and obscenity. He himself admitted: "If on my arrival in Ars I had foreseen all that I was to suffer there, I would have died on the spot...I thought a time would come when people would rout me out of Ars with sticks, when the Bishop would suspend me, and I would end my days in prison. I see, however, that I am not worthy of such a grace."

In his catechetical instructions, the Curé of Ars reveals the formula he recommended for holiness of life: "...Reflect that a Christian's treasure is not on earth but in heaven. Therefore our thoughts should turn to where our treasure is. Ours is a noble task: that of prayer and love. To pray and to love, that constitutes the greatest possible happiness for us in this life. Prayer is nothing less than union with God...My children, I know your hearts are small, but prayer will enlarge them and make them capable of loving God...It is my belief that if we were to speak to God out of a living faith and a pure heart, we should receive all we ask..." 

Learning To Be "Rich Toward God"

Here is a story which I gleaned from the blog site of Fr. Rick McCracken-Bennett, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in New Albany, OH:

“There is an old story about two brothers who inherited the family farm. They also inherited the core value that, within the family, everyone must be treated with absolute equality. One brother was single and the other was married with three children. As the story goes, there were two houses on the farm, so each brother got one. There were two large barns and two smaller barns and each brother got one of each. The animals were divided equally and when there was an odd number they had a cookout in which they, of course, equally shared down to the last bratwurst. The land was divided equally as well, acre by acre, pasture by pasture.


Now some thought these brothers were taking this fairness thing to extremes because every evening they would make certain that the animals were back to whichever brother they belonged and any grain left over was divided into sacks and taken to each one’s granary. Absolutely everything was divided equally, just as their father had wanted it. 

This worked just fine until one day when the younger brother began to think about this arrangement. “This is not fair…not fair at all. We must change this arrangement. Why, my brother has a wife and three children while I am single. He has more mouths to feed than I. Ah! I know what I will do.” And that evening, under the cover of darkness, the younger brother took a sack of grain from his own granary and took it to his brother’s granary and left it there. He continued to do this every night thereafter.


That same day the older brother thought to himself, “This is not fair…not fair at all. We must change this arrangement. Why, my brother is single, while I have a wife and three children. They will take care of me when I am old and can no longer work on the farm, while my brother will have no one to care for him. Ah! I know what I will do.” And that evening, under the cover of darkness, the older brother took a sack of grain from his granary and took it to his brother’s. He continued to do this night after night.


One very, very dark night, as the story goes, when each of them was moving grain from their granary to the other’s they smacked into each other. When they recovered and realized what the other had 
been doing, they embraced in a brotherly embrace and, I’m told, they continued their practice until the day when they were too old to carry the sacks of grain anymore. And to this day, their children and their children’s children, and even their children carry sacks of grain each day to help them remember and honor the unselfishness of their ancestors.”

Such people, says today’s Gospel (Luke 12:13-21), realize that “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions”, outwardly or inwardly. They know how to be “rich toward God.” The Scriptures from Hosea the prophet (11:1-11) and from the Epistle to the Colossians (3:1-11), along with St. Luke’s account, teach us how that is possible for us.

Hosea offers a picture of the Lord God as a loving, nurturing parent, agonizing over the punishment of wayward, wandering children: a parent who is as pained as a child to whom discipline is given. Hosea, having two sons and a daughter of his own, could relate to this, and could thus describe God as a parent lifting an infant to the cheek, helping a toddler walk, picking up and embracing a child. "I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love." Hosea describes the risks of raising children, even the possibility of rebellion. Though God's children turn away to idols, God reacts with tender compassion, rather than anger. At the end of the passage, Hosea envisions a homecoming: “They shall go after the Lord…[God's] children shall come trembling like birds...and I will return them to their homes…” God’s people become “rich toward God” by witnessing God’s uninhibited compassion and mercy at work in their lives.

The result is that God’s people grow from selfish narcissism and spiritual infancy, to toddlerhood, to adolescent arrogance and open rebellion, while God as parent, all the while, remains steady in lovingkindness, until the wayward ones grow weary, their souls faint within them, their inner thirst and hunger for true life drawing them back to the source of living waters. They become “rich toward God”.

The Epistle to the Colossians was possibly written by a disciple of Paul who borrowed his name, a frequent practice in the first centuries. Epaphras, not Paul, had founded the church at Colossae, and Paul never actually visited there. Nevertheless, Paul felt a deep connection to the community. In this passage he responds to reports of divisions within the church. Some of the members felt that they could “supplement” their faith in Christ, particularly by engaging in various ascetic practices, which might aid them through ecstatic visions or mystical experiences to participate more directly in the worship of God. Paul cautions the Colossians: “Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body...grows with a growth that is from God…” He questions unorthodox “human commands and teachings.” “These”, he says, “have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.”

Paul then exhorts them, much like parent would a young adult who’s about to leave home, perhaps to enter college, or go to a new geographical location, or be married or to take employment away from one’s birthplace. Many of us have been on the receiving and giving end of such “loving warnings”: ”Remember who you are, be careful, take care of yourself. Make sure you wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident.” In a similar way, the author of Colossians firmly exhorts his hearers: “Seek the things...Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth...your life is hidden with Christ in God...you also will be revealed with him in glory...Put to death...fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry)...get rid of...anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth...Do not lie to one another...you have stripped off the old self...and have clothed yourselves with the new self...In that renewal...Christ is all and in all!”

These are words which you and I, and anyone who claims to follow Jesus need to hear, even those whose conversion may have been long in the past. In the verses following today’s passage there is a refreshing restatement of who we are, as Christian women and men, and as fellow parish members, and of how we might learn to be truly “rich toward God”. Paul says: "As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body..."

Finally, in Luke’s Gospel passage, Jesus himself shows us how to be be “rich toward God”:
1) Jesus says: “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” If Jesus, to whom God gave authority to judge, refuses to condemn the greedy brother of the man who approached him, what makes you and I think that we can condemn others, and even do so in Jesus’ name?
2) Jesus says: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” There was a motto back in the 1980s which declared "Greed is good". Obviously, Jesus doesn’t “buy” that. Sara Dylan Breuer says that Luke “makes clear that Jesus' way privileges reconciliation over merely being right. And that's a very liberating way to live. When we're dead set on accumulation, whether it's some kind of moral points we think we're gathering or wealth to shield us from misfortune and suffering, we end up trapped in anxiety. Behind insisting that we're right, others are wrong, and God will vindicate those who are truly good, there's usually an anxiety that others are getting ahead of us. Behind our efforts to accumulate enough to handle any illness or disaster that comes our way, to live in a ‘good neighborhood’ where bad things supposedly don't happen, and to experience enough luxury to distract us from insecurity and fear, there's usually an awareness that we're kidding ourselves, that life involves vulnerability…”

Instead of cataloguing our personal, or family, or parish, worries and potential disasters, and calculating how much we need to shield ourselves from them, wouldn’t it be much more constructive -- and comforting -- for you and me to bring our mistrust, our anxiety, our fear, to God, and to treat the world, the Church, our parish or our family as places gifted to us by God in which we can witness and participate in God's indiscriminate compassion and mercy, places in which you and I can become truly “rich toward God”?

William Wilberforce & Anthony Ashley-Cooper: Witnesses for Social Justice

Just and eternal God, we give you thank for the stalwart faith

and persistence of your servants William Wilberforce and

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who, undeterred by opposition

and failure, held fast to a vision of justice in which no child

of yours might suffer in enforced servitude and misery.

Grant  that we, drawn by that same Gospel vision, may persevere

in serving the common good and caring for those who have been

cast down, that they may be raised up through Jesus Christ. Amen.

SS. Martha, Mary & Lazarus of Bethany

Martha, the homemaker: bustling about, "busy about many things". Mary, the contemplative, content to sit at Jesus' feet and learn, choosing "the better part". Lazarus, a "resurrection billboard", given a second chance at life.

A family. Probably the closest to a family which Jesus had during his adult ministry.

"We need to have people who mean something to us, people to whom we can turn, knowing that being them is coming home." (Bernard Cooke) 

A Kind of Church Leader We Could Use Today

Blessed William Reed Huntington (1838-1909): Episcopal priest, husband, father, practical theologian, writer, secretary of the 1892 Book of Common Prayer revision, nominee for bishop in 8 dioceses (all of which he declined), liturgical designer, and ecumenicist (having developed the four principles of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, one of the Episcopal Church's most important historical documents), once quipped: "...If you map out four distinct parties [in the Church], and name them ritualistic, high, low, and broad, I am a good deal in doubt where I properly belong..."

Nevertheless, he was an eloquent proponent of oneness within the Episcopal Church, as well as of oneness among the various Christian denominations.

Among his memorable statements:  "Antagonisms there must always be in the Church, but organized antagonisms ought as far as possible...to be avoided." A profoundly wise bit of advice which it would be well for all involved in the recent and current disagreements within the Anglican Communion to take to heart.

His statement, from his book The Church Idea (1870), is still terribly relevant to the life of the Episcopal Church generally, and to that of each of its parishes and missions: "...If our whole ambition as Anglicans in America be to continue a small, but eminently respectable body of Christians, and to offer a refuge to people of refinement and sensibility, who are shocked by the irreverences they are apt to encounter elsewhere; in a word, if we care to be only a countercheck and not a force in society; then let us say as much in plain terms, and frankly renounce any and all claim to Catholicity. We have only, in such a case, to wrap the robe of our dignity about us, and walk quietly along in seclusion no one will take much trouble to disturb. Thus may we be a Church in name, and a sect in deed. But if we aim at something nobler than this, if we would have our Communion become national in very truth—in other words, if we would bring the Church of Christ into the closest possible sympathy with the throbbing, sorrowing, sinning, repenting, aspiring heart of this great people—then let us press our reasonable claims to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance (which ill befits those who best possessions have come to them by inheritance), but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal."

"Fervent love" for the Church and its mission in the world, and "unflagging faith" in God's promises are two of Huntington's qualities mentioned in the collect for his feast day today: worthy ideals for us who, in Baptism, bear the name of Christ.

Let's Hear It For the Grandparents!

Today's feast of SS. Anna and Joachim, parents of  Mary and grandparents of Our Lord, is a good occasion to celebrate all of us grandparents! We know nothing of Jesus' grandparents from Scripture, and there's no indication as to whether they were alive or deceased at the time he lived. I'd like to think that they were around long enough for him to get to know them and for them to spoil him silly as I do my own grandchild! Surely we can presume that they loved their own daughter, Mary, and saw to it that she was raised as an intelligent and good Jewish girl. She certainly turned out to be an exemplary woman, and Scripture does attest to that. Whatever lessons Anna and Joachim taught Mary certainly equipped her well for the role God chose for her in the economy of salvation. Thanks be to God for Anna and Joachim! And thanks be to God for all of us grandparents! May we continue to be creditable examples to our children and grandchildren.

St. John Cassian (c. 360-433)

Speaking of the early Egyptian Fathers of the desert whom he and his friend, Germanus, interviewed regarding the monastic life, Cassian says: "...Thanks to them, they who have established themselves in the vastest solitude and are separated from the companionship of all mortal beings, thereby possessing spiritual enlightenment, contemplate and proclaim things that will perhaps seem impossible to those who are unpracticed and ignorant by reason of their condition and their mediocre behavior. In this regard, however, if anyone wishes to give a true opinion and desires to see whether these things can be fulfilled, let him first hasten to seize upon their chosen orientation with similar zeal and by a similar way of life. Only then he realize that what seemed beyond human capacity is not only possible but even most sweet..." (Introduction to The Conferences)