Love and Suspicion
When the Canadian border opened up to U-S tourists, my family members were among the first to head north and open up a lakefront cottage we hadn't seen for nearly 2 years.
Upon arrival we noticed, down by the beach, that a number of old and rickety beach chairs were stashed away under the shelter of trees. It was in an area where, historically, loud trespassing teenagers brought beer and made bonfires and noise on the beach at night. It had become apparent that in our absence someone had been using our property!
There was great debate about what to do with these chairs. Until I and others decided that whomever had stowed them on our property should not have the right to see them again, so the chairs were taken to the dump and ceremoniously thrown away.
The following week family members encountered an elderly man on the beach who inquired about these chairs. He said that he was a retired hydrologist, and he along with other environmental advocates had taken it upon themselves to make regular trips to our beach and take water, soil and air samples to measure the quality of the environment. He mentioned that they had brought some chairs with them because it was a long walk from where they had to park. And had anyone seen those chairs?
Embarrassed, no one spoke up - and the elderly man walked off.
Since then we have been humbled by what we saw and what we did, we were forced into introspection: why were we so distrustful? Why had we automatically jumped to such a negative conclusion? Aren't we, as Christians, called to calibrate our default setting at love and faith and not fear and suspicion?
In Sunday's gospel, Jesus confronts a band of religious leaders who seem to regularly have done the same thing. He called out the tendency of these Jewish religious leaders to operate out of control and fear instead of open-hearted trust. Jesus seems to use them as negative examples of what you and I are supposed to do.
At our core, you and I are built to love. We came into the world through love, we become our best selves when we love, and we are destined, one day, to be reunited with love. However when we listen to the voices of fear and suspicion, love becomes lessened. And God knows, that we are surrounded by voices of distrust, fear, and suspicion that are trying to lessen our love!
Bertrand Russell once said that, "love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way and if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn the kind of charity and the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet."
We have to learn to be less judgmental of beach chairs and open to the possibility that they are owned not by selfish trespassers, but by caring people.
