Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

I read a story about our patron saint the other day, Saint Alphonsus. There was a religious sister whom everyone thought was holy. When she died, Saint Alphonsus received a vision of her and saw that she was in hell. And so he asked, “How could this be?”

Through the grace of that vision, he was shown her history. Yes, she did many of the things that make one look holy. She spent time in prayer and engaged in service. She did all the things one would expect, and so everyone thought she was a very holy woman.

But in her heart, she was growing prideful. She prayed more than others, and so she thought more and more of herself. She looked down on others and thought they were less than her. Every outward act we might associate with holiness that she performed better than someone else increased her pride and drew her further away from the Lord. And so she ended up with that terrible fate.

I tell this story not only because we should be careful about judging by outward appearances when we cannot see someone’s heart, but also as a caution to all of us. We can all fall into this trap. We can become so focused on external things, so convinced that we are holy, that we fail to see what is happening in our hearts. They have not changed as they should, and we are drawing away from Christ rather than closer to him.

That affects how we hear today’s Gospel, because one of the keys to understanding any Gospel passage is recognizing who we are in the situation. I think we’re too quick to identify ourselves with the poor, the crippled, those who say yes to the invitation and go to the feast. But I think most of us are the ones who say no. We’re supposed to recognize ourselves in those who say no.

“I’ve got new oxen. Let me go check them out. I’ve got some new land. I want to go look at it. I’ve got a new spouse. I need to spend time with her.” We are the ones who find trivial reasons to say no to God. “Oh, I’ve got more time. I can pray later. I can do that later.”

But if we too quickly identify ourselves with those who say yes, we don’t hear the challenge in the Gospel, and so we don’t change.

We need to recognize that even if, at a deep level, we are on the right path and moving toward Christ, we are not perfect. We all need to change. That call to conversion, that continual change, is a fundamental part of the Christian life.

And so we need to hear the Gospel in a way that truly challenges us, to recognize parts of ourselves in those who do the wrong thing in these parables. We need to hear that challenge, evaluate our lives, and find all those places where we allow trivialities—the things we know, from the perspective of eternity, do not matter—to replace our time with God.

We need to get rid of those things, to push them out of our lives and make room for the Lord, so that each day we may draw closer to the Kingdom of God, closer to our Lord and to the great gift of life that he wants to give us.