15th Sunday after Pentecost

Bear one another’s burdens. These words, more than any others from our Scriptures today, arrest my attention / even though the contrast between the flesh and the spirit, also in this Epistle, are pretty enticing subjects to preach about. Bear one another’s burdens: The image that comes to mind is of everybody carrying something, like reapers hauling in their bundles, the stronger ones saying to the weaker, ‘Here, let me help you carry your load.’ When this metaphor is translated into concrete ways of helping others, the whole gamut of Christian spiritual and corporal works of mercy come into play, from helping someone with financial problems to spending time with someone who’s lonely. Bear one another’s burdens. The burdens of life are various and many, and no one gets through life without having to carry some of its weight.

When these burdens take the form of moral weaknesses that tend towards sin, we have a different kind of weight, different because these are not merely imposed on us, like the pounds we are already forced to carry, but–being sinful things–they’re to some degree voluntary burdens. By choice, we increase the already-great burdens of life by selecting our sins. And here I would like to advert to an expression in modern jargon that’s apropos: we say that someone is carrying a lot of “excess baggage” with him, meaning guilt. It’s not a bad expression, really, except for what’s often meant as its remedy, that is, merely to drop it by forgetting it. This would be nice, were it possible, but the burdens, the baggage we choose to carry (our sins) can’t be disposed of so easily. They need to be lifted from us; they require outside help. “Bear one another’s burdens.”

The first application of this is that without the Sacrament of Confession we can’t drop the baggage of our sins. Christ has to lift them off from the weighted soul. There is no such thing as self-forgiveness, self-absolution. If that were possible, there would have been no need for Christ to give the Church the power to forgive sins: “Whose sins you forgive they are given.” People who avoid confession, trying to unburden themselves by wishing their sins away, are playing make-believe.

A second application is that we can help others with their sin-loads not only by counseling, advising, encouraging them to confess, but also by making reparation. That little appreciated word reparation means a great deal: praying for the more unfortunate, those with sins on their consciences so that they return to the Church, go to Confession, leave their sinful associates, relinquish their sinful lifestyles. It sometimes takes a great deal of prayer, fasting (this is a little known but very effective way) to bring a sinful soul back to grace, a spiritually dead person to return to life.

Here my thoughts go to the grieving widow of the Gospel, she whose only adolescent son had just died. Parents especially, but not exclusively, feel the immense sorrow of seeing children lose the Catholic faith, live in sin, not go to Mass, stay away from Confession, get into the modern lifestyles where all is fast and exciting and...so empty. The greatest act of love for another is to help them save his soul.

Thursday this week is the feast of St. Augustine, the archetype of the man of the world gone astray who is brought to his senses and becomes a Christian, a bishop, a saint of the Church through the unceasing pleading of his mother, St. Monica. We have in our parish a St. Monica Sodality, a thing I hope some day spreads throughout the Church, by which we implore this determined, persevering model of parents, to intercede in heaven for the return of others, especially family, to the practice of the faith. the stories of conversions through this means are impressive, and I would like to recommend that you take up the suggested daily prayers to her for helping your own relatives and others to re-practice the faith, or to discover it for the first time, as the case may be. The advantage of the Sodality is that everyone praying also takes on everybody else who’s on the great list of the needy. It’s a cooperative venture.

Bear one another’s burdens. The applications of this apostolic injunction are many. They remind us of how weak we are individually, and how strong we can be collectively. This is among the immense benefits of being incorporated into the body of Christ, the Catholic Church.