Faith and religious sense
(Lk 11:37-41)
Ablutions before the meal (v.38) were an imposed religious obligation.
But the Eucharistic banquet [read in filigree] doesn’t celebrate detachments, nor is it affected by purist idolatry.
The severe spirit, from "dry cleaning" - as Pope Francis would say - still today gives a white lime hand to the reality of the Father.
Indeed, impurity does not proceed from lack of form (as in the façade religiosity), but from the behaviour that reveals a substantial void.
What stains is all inside, and hatches despite the beautiful petitions of principle, or good manners - which cover bad habits.
In short, what is offered is pure; what is kept, impure (v.41).
From a spiritual point of view, only those who give themselves are without blemish; impure those who think only of themselves in a trivial way, or turn to their neighbour to manipulate him.
Thus, often the external norms or ideas of men do not go to the root: they fossilize us.
They don’t tear or integrate from within the malicious contents, the unfair desires - the real goals.
Observances themselves often create spiritual competition.
In this way they annihilate the spirit of charity and hospitality - compendium of the Law - from which those same ancient signs were born, in the first assemblies of faith.
Of course, Justice plays a decisive role, but it’s an existential commitment. The ’right position’ is for life, not to putting things “right” [dead things, or sophisticated and abstract that they are].
According to the Gospels, God must not be confused with the precepts, nor ideologies of the future, if schematic and disembodied.
The Lord wants to enter our concrete existence - and the excess of minutiae or fantasies can make us lose the fundamental orientation of his Call, corrupting sensitivity to the signals in which He reveals himself.
Legalism, habits, or abstruse and imported fashions, can make us incapable of corresponding to the missionary vocation.
They become hoods that prevent us from serving the individual freedoms of the shaky.
They make us awkward in accompanying people so that they increase their capacity for life and character.
Here Jesus invites the “Pharisees” [those in his Church] to understand the freedom of God and not to transform the Faith into any devout, cunning, or abstract (no backbone) creed.
It is not the supposed uncontaminatedness or ‘right-just thinking’ that enables us in His Presence and makes us proceed along endless paths.
We experience this in the global crisis.
It’s meeting Him that consecrates and makes adequate, pure, realized, already complete.
‘Perfects’ - for the type of Seed we are called to plant in the world.
Enough worries on top of that, wich leave everyone in the lurch, in torment, and with no way out.
As if even in the People of Sons it was permissible to impose and see cages, lanes, forced worldviews, and padlocks everywhere.
To internalize and live the message:
What was the key moment when you felt forgiven and pure? By copying someone?
[Tuesday 28th wk. in O.T. October 15, 2024]
