Your Deepest Gladness and the World's Deepest Needs

For Theresa, the defining moment came one night with an unexpected knock on the door. At the time, she was a teacher in a private girls school. But when she opened the door that night, she found a dying woman crumpled on the landing. She took the woman from one hospital to another looking for help, but none of the hospitals would take the woman in. Finally, it was too late. The woman died in her arms.

It was a defining moment. It touched something very deep inside her—a well of deep love and deep anger. From that point on, the woman we now call Mother Theresa would not be the same. Her life would be about trying to make sure that the poor in her city died with dignity, knowing that they are loved.

It’s good to pay attention to such unexpected moments in our lives—moments that I think we each have now and then, moments that reach deep into our souls. They can sometimes be the foundation of what we religious types call “ministry”—that place, as one theologian writes, where our own deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest needs; that moment when we find ourselves working shoulder to shoulder with God in that fragile adventure of creating the world.

I had such a moment several years ago. I was having lunch by myself in a small Japanese place up on California Avenue. I was reading a magazine, but couldn’t help but notice a man across the room having lunch, or rather, trying to have lunch, with his two-year-old son. It was just a typical slice of life, nothing unusual. I’d return to reading my magazine, but my eyes kept wandering back to this father-son duo and their antics.

I knew something was going on inside me when I felt the tears running down my face. It was a defining moment. It touched something in my soul. Things would never be the same. It led to Rob’s and my decision to become parents.

Have you noticed similar moments in your life? Don’t let them go by unattended to. They could very well be angels with important messages for you, messages about your ministry.

And don’t get confused by the churchy word “ministry”: It’s not about getting ordained. In fact, 99% of it doesn’t even have anything to do with church. It’s simply part of our birthright as human beings, this deep desire to love and the deep joy it brings. It’s wired into every cell of our bodies.

Years ago, there was an exchange in the press between Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and mystic and a young mother. Merton had written an article about how, after several years in the monastery, things had become tedious. The glow of the early days had worn off, and this was causing him a dark night of the soul, a spiritual challenge unlike any he had known before. The young mother shot off a letter to the editor saying that it was not just monks who experienced such dark nights. Parents shuttling their kids to and from school activities, cradling them in the night when they’re sick, waiting in line at the grocery store—these moments are no less significant than the challenges Merton was experiencing. The only difference was that if you’re a mom, no one is calling you holy because you don’t wear long robes and sing Gregorian chant.

Don’t equate ministry and its challenges with its churchy manifestations. It’s central to every human life. And it’s what the story of Jesus is about—Jesus, the one who shows us what it means to be fully human.

Which brings us to today’s gospel. When you stumble upon that deep place from which your ministry emerges, it can take you on journeys you never would have imagined.

If Jesus once referred to himself by saying "I am the light of the world," he would later say to his disciples "You are the light of the world." Another Theresa, this one of Avila, got what he meant. She put it this way: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on the world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” And maybe this is our greatest spiritual challenge: to assume as our very own the identity of Christ.

Do you want to know what Christ looks like? What Christ's voice sounds like? Look around the room. Look in the mirror. We are the body of Christ.

Jesus believes this about his disciples when he sends them on their journey in today’s gospel. They have already tapped into that well deep inside them, and now they are beginning to play out the concrete dimensions of what their ministry is to mean. In this moment, I see Jesus as full of all the nervousness of parents sending their kids out of the nest. He hopes they are ready and at the same time he knows they’re not. He gives them an almost endless list of do's and don'ts. They are lambs in the midst of wolves. There are risks and dangers.

Yet he tells them, and us, “Nothing will hurt you.” Quite a statement, especially from someone who himself will be nailed to a cross.

There are many levels to us human beings, and many of these are subject to pain and passing—our bodies, our minds, our everyday mood swings. But the level from which ministry springs, that place of our deepest love and deepest joy, that level is where we are connected to the source of our being. That level is secured by God, it is beyond harm, it does not end.

For us the journey may look a little different than for the first disciples: a ride to city hall to request something as simple as a marriage license, or to church to ask for a blessing for you and your spouse and your life together; or a march down Market street with a sign demanding an end to the brutality of this insane war; or a trip to Martin dePorres House to chop vegetables and ladle out soup.

Or perhaps the journey is quieter, subtler, more interior: coming free from an addiction; or letting go of a toxic relationship; or consciously overriding old fears, old voices that have kept you from loving and being loved.

When the disciples return, they’re ecstatic. They’ve succeeded: “Lord, in your name, even the demons have submitted to us.” And Jesus laughs and celebrates with them, but tells them not to rejoice because they have new powers that swell them with a bursting sense of significance. Rather, rejoice because in this fragile adventure of creation, this adventure we call life, your love is building nothing less than the kingdom of God.

He knew this joy himself. And this is why Jesus, the lover of this earth, would smile and whisper into the ears of people who would carry on that love—people like you and me—“Rejoice! Your names are written in heaven.”