17th Sunday after Pentecost, 2008

The repetition of words / is a rhetorical device used / for emphasis, to hit on a point with insistence so that it won’t be missed. Parents, teachers, and sermon-givers will often repeat certain words in order to ‘get through’ to their hearers. In the passage given to us from Ephesians, St. Paul repeats two words (in the Latin text at least). One of these is the word ‘chains.’ Now when chains are used to bind people, they’re terrible instruments and symbols of the loss of freedom. We think of imprisonment; we think of bond slaves. St. Paul used a phrase we should think about: ‘I am,’ he says, ‘chained unto the Lord.’ His meaning should be examined: being chained, he’s not free to be anyone or anything his inclination might dictate. His life was defined by limits. Paul was not / a ‘free spirit,’ as we say. His thoughts he held in subjection to Christ (so that he had to accept doctrine); his will was chained to the commandments of God; and even his body was chained, the literal meaning, when he was imprisoned–losing his freedom of movement–as a punishment for speaking about Christ, about the Catholic faith. Paul was a man chained, bound–but chained ‘in Domino,’ unto the Lord. These qualifying words gave reason and sense to his chains, to his servitude. To belong totally to Christ is a joyful and fulfilling kind of bondage.

Here I would like you to consider yourselves. None of you is so totally free, no matter how free-spirited, how free-thinking you are, as to be without ‘bonds’ to things beyond your control. Some simple examples: you are / male of female; you have a given race, / parentage, / a fixed set of mental capabilities and talents. You might wish to be other than you are, you may even resent being what you are, / but your life is, in good measure, given. You are–in a manner of speaking–chained to your identity.

But there’s one thing that constitutes an inviolable freedom–namely, your will–that inner-chamber of your soul by which you choose fundamentally who you are morally. Only you will determine whether you are good or bad, a saint or a sinner. ¿What are your going to do with that freedom, the most momentous set of decisions you have to make? For St. Paul his was a freedom in Domino, to be ‘unto the Lord.’

Before I make more on that point about that, I want to mention the other word that he repeats in his passage. It’s the word ‘one,’ o-n-e one. God is one God. There is one faith (that is, one Christian religion, one Catholic truth and no alternates); there is one body of Church members who are linked to one another by charity. ¿Why is there this insistence upon oneness? While we have / a great variety in the manner in which we can express our faith and express our love for God and neighbor, faith is one set of beliefs and love makes a unified Church. These then are ‘chains’ (to return to our metaphor), chains to God which make obligations on us. You are not free to be ‘anything at all’–here’s that rhetorical use of repetition–you are bound by the bands of religion. The word religion itself is significant: the letters l-i-g in the middle of the word religion come from the Latin ligare, to bind together or to oblige. Religion is something that ties you down–to God.

So, everyone of you is bound. All the immense field-you-have of choice-in-so-many good possibilities about what you to eat, what clothes to wear, what Mass to attend–such an immense possibility of options! Yet you are circumscribed, defined by many things you can’t change: who you are. But the one most important definition of your identity is that you are a Catholic Christian, and this is a voluntary chaining, a restraining of your selves so that you can belong completely to Christ: to be ‘chained unto the Lord.’ ¿Is this not a beautiful thing? To be bound to Christ! Here we see that these chains are only metaphors for what is in fact our real freedom which makes us share in some of the infinity of God’s goodness and beatitude. No one’s more free, none is more rich or more happy than a Catholic Christian in a state of grace, who’s free to love God with all his heart, soul and mind. Jesus made Himself a ‘prisoner’ of love by incarnating in a human body; by crucifixion; by confinement in the Communion Host. Become yourself then a ‘prisoner unto the Lord’ ........ for your everlasting / liberation.

A Prayer of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, my entire will. Whatever I have or possess you have given me: I restore it all to you to be guided by your will. Give me only your love and your grace and I am rich indeed, nor could I ask for more.