Twenty second Sunday of OT

Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
August 31, 2003

Are you a creature of habit?

How many of you drove to church today? Quick show of hands please! How many of you consciously remember the act of turning on your blinker before you turned off of Natural Bridge onto Bellerive avenue on your way here? (How many of you actually turned on your blinker before turning?) It is easy not to remember- because the advantage of habit is that you no longer have to think about the action once initiated. Muscle memory takes over, and before hardly a conscious thought, the action is done. Habitual action is a good thing. As a soccer coach, I’d schedule drill after drill so that the habits of trapping, settling, and passing the ball would become automatic to my players. So they wouldn’t have to think about the action in the heat of the battle. So they’d be able to act with great freedom and creativity to whatever new challenge the game presented. So that their brains wouldn’t be worrying about the proper way to do a throw in, but where and to whom do I throw the ball. Habits: way to make important actions become an automatic response.

Habits can be prized things - especially as they express the deep values and goals of life. And the Pharisees had them down. They knew the habits of the law. “Washings, sprinklings, proper dress, proper eating habits.” Automatic responses in the daily and mundane tasks of their day, so that God would be honored in the greatest decisions to the smallest details. But like hitting the blinker before making a turn, habits can become mindless things, and lose the very effect we chose them for. That is the concern that Jesus has in the gospel. And the message that comes to us in our era - are our habitual actions things that free us to love, and that express devotion, or have they become ends in themselves?

We don’t do sprinklings and washings in our day - but I invite you to think back to today’s mass. My suspicion is that you did at least two habitual things. 1) You genuflected or bowed, perhaps using the sign of the cross as you entered your pew, and 2) you did that three cross thing - over the forehead, lips and heart at the gospel. Nice habits. Good things to do.

But did you think about it? Did you think, as you signed the cross on yourself - I sign myself into a way of life. I mark myself with the symbol of where life is won - in the dying of self emptying love. And did that sign of the cross may you more present to our God who is Father, Son and Spirit? As you did the three crosses - did you pray - God, be in my mind, in my heart and on my lips that I might live and proclaim the good news I am about to hear?
Ah, now you begin to understand how easy it is to let habitual actions become empty. To let good actions, chosen to reverence God - become less than what they could be. Hear the gospel call to renew those moments and movements. For instance, in the revised General Instruction to the Roman Missal (GIRM), we are invited to bow before we receive communion - a little habitual action that prepares myself for the encounter with Jesus in this sacrament. Will you let that become a movement that brings your heart deeper in love with God?

Jesus takes the discussion one level further as he invites us to look at the source of our habitual actions. From where does evil come? Not from the externals - but from within, he tells us. From the deep places of the heart. The list he reads - 6 actions and 6 tendencies - indicate the state of a heart. A state of the heart that expresses itself first in actions and then in habits. Envy is a habit of the heart to hold onto the need to be first. Greed - a habit of the heart to hoard or possess more than what one needs. Malice - a habit of the heart to nurture evil or pettiness. And so it goes.

Are you a creature of habit - not just external habits, like signs of the cross, genuflections and bows, but of internal habits - malice, greed, envy and the like? Or does your body practice patience, kindness, meekness, and gentleness? For, if habits are ways to express in action what is important to us, then what do your habits tell God about what matters to you?