This Sunday's Homily in advance…

St. Mary of Egypt Sunday
2010

We live, for the most part, in an unexamined state. In the affairs of life few of us ever have much time, frankly, to look at our lives with any kind of clarity at all and certainly not with the pure vision that only God possesses.

We see ourselves basically in shadows, blurred images, a face we see in the mirror for a few minutes and then it is gone. For the most part the world is simply filled with varieties of noise, a hundred things trying to get our attention at any one minute and we hardly pay attention to any of it, or to ourselves.

For the most part its only a crisis of some kind that forces the potential for reflection on our lives. When a somber doctor says “It’s cancer, and we’ll do the best we can”, or you take the long walk out of the office with your desk in a cardboard box there is suddenly space for clarity.

In the case of St. Mary of Egypt, whose Sunday we are calling to mind, it came at the door of a church. In a moment she saw the trajectory of her life in all its infamy and pain and in that moment the Holy Spirit spoke to her about her life, her sins, her potential future, and everything else that really mattered.

Her response to this moment of insight was tears and the complete renunciation of her self in the embrace of God. It was in that moment that the woman who had given herself to everyone understood that only God finally mattered and every hunger would find its satisfaction with Him. It was in that moment when she stepped away from death into life.

The season of Lent is quickly coming to an end and with it the invitation to self examination and repentance. The truth is that it can be a terrifying thing to stand naked and exposed before God with the whole of our lives subjected to His vision. For the most part we’re glad to let the business of life keep us from taking a truthful and honest look at ourselves. Embarrassment, pain, a fear of the unknown, all of this and more prevents us from coming to God with a clear perspective of who we are.

Yet just as a doctor needs total truth from us in order to properly diagnose and treat our illnesses so we, too, need complete honesty about ourselves before God as the first step to curing the dark sicknesses of our soul. And while God, in His mercy may allow a crisis to help focus on the true state of things we can also willingly engage in this process choosing to live a life of complete honesty towards God each day.

The remarkable thing, of course, is that our fears in these things are groundless. We may think that somehow we are hiding from God, that His vision of us can be blurred or distorted like our own. Such is not the case. Admit it or not God knows us to the depths of our being. God knows us better then we know ourselves. Nothing is hidden. When we go to confession we tell God nothing new.

Yet it is precisely at the moment that we expose every hidden corner of ourselves to God that we discover love greater then we could possibly imagine. In one moment St. Mary of Egypt, who had been filled with the insatiable desire for men, came to her senses and her troubled heart, her arms so often full of empty love, came to know the love that endures and cannot be quenched. Her wandering through life ended and she was filled with pure, clear, and holy purpose.

While there is still time in Lent we can ask God for this great gift, to see our lives as they truly are, to be exposed in every hidden corner and yet in doing so to begin the healing we crave, the grace we need, and the love that never fades. There is but a week before Holy Week yet so much good is still possible if we are willing to say “Here I am, God, take everything I am, give me eyes to see what is true and right and good, eyes to see you and see myself with clarity, and like St. Mary of Egypt heal this broken sinner who stands before the doors of your temple seeking what I lost in Eden so long ago.”