Mystical Word: 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C
Readings for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Wisdom 9:13-18b | Philemon 9-10, 12-17 | Luke 14:25-33
The gift of nothing is the gift of true happiness.
Patrick McDonnell, the creator of the comic strip Mutts, wrote a children’s book called
The Gift of Nothing. In it, Mooch the cat looks for a gift for Earl the dog. Mooch sees Earl has a
bowl, a bed, and a chew toy. He has it all! So, Mooch thought, “What do you get someone who
has everything?” “Nothing!” Mooch discovers he can give Earl the gift of nothing! But then,
Mooch encounters a problem. Where can he get nothing in a world chock-full of somethings?
He searches on TV, outside, and in a store. He doesn’t find the gift of nothing anywhere.
Exhausted, Mooch plops down on his favorite pillow and just sits still, silent. “And not looking
for it, he found nothing,” writes McDonnell. Mooch then gets a big box for “the nothing.” He
traipses over to Earl’s house and gives him the big box full of nothing. Earl opens it and says,
“There’s nothing here,” and Mooch replies, “Yesh! Nothing…but me and you.” Mooch and Earl
give each other a big hug and then both of them sit down. They become still and silent to enjoy
nothing… “and everything.”
The gift of nothing is the gift of true happiness. It is the gift Jesus gives us and the path
he teaches us in today’s very hard Gospel. Turning to the crowds following him, Jesus says, “If
anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus doles out some tough wisdom today.
Happiness lies in God alone. So, not even our families constitute happiness. To follow Jesus into
the joy of oneness with God, we have to be loyal to God alone, even more than to our families.
Jesus is not saying family is sinful or somehow wrong. He is attacking our attitudes
towards family, particularly our tendency to treat family as an idol. We can make a certain
conception of family – one based on an ideology and not real life – into an idol. It can become a
weapon in the hands of an extremist right-wing group like Focus on the Family. Its founder,
James Dobson, used his very narrow conception of family to justify the persecution of the
LGBTQ+ community or, atrociously, the abuse of children. The problem is not family in itself,
which is good, but an attachment to family or a particular idea of family. When Jesus says we
have to “hate our families,” he is calling us to surrender our co-dependence on our families.
Healthy and loving relationships with our families are not at stake here. If anything, detachment
creates more loving families because the detached person does not expect infinite happiness from
spouse and children.
“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” The
way of the cross is the way of joy, as we have been exploring in these reflections on Gospel
happiness. In today’s reading, Jesus clearly lays out the principle of joy: hating family, carrying
the cross, and renouncing possessions. These may not strike us as happy teachings, but rather as
hard and punishing. Meister Eckhart, however, says denying self is “not merely a
commandment…it is a promise and a divine prescription for a man to make all his suffering, all
his deeds, and all his life happy and joyful.” The way of the cross frees our inherent joy from all
the things to which we shackle it.
Through the two metaphors of building a tower and a king going to war, Jesus implores
us to calculate the cost of our attachments. He wants us to see what they are doing to our lives. It
helps to recall Meister Eckhart’s wisdom: “all suffering comes from attachment.” We chain our
hearts to things like success, money, owning a home, earning a degree, or having a beautiful
family. They rob us of joy because we are invested in procuring these things and protecting them
lest we become miserable at their loss. That is a lot of energy to spend on something that doesn’t
give lasting happiness.
Still, how do we enjoy nothing and everything like Mooch and Earl and as Jesus teaches
us? We have to practice interior silence. We have to enter the interior state of nothingness. First,
we have to take a line from an obscure medieval Dominican friar, William Peraldus, who says,
“prayer is easy!” This is not hard. All that is required is to stop thinking and to sink into the
nothingness of God. It is to practice non-resistance, non-retention, and non-reaction towards our
thoughts and feelings. To do so is to enjoy the Mystery of God within by not paying attention to
our thinking. This is contemplation. St. Thomas Aquinas says, “Contemplation consists in the
simple enjoyment of the truth.” We enjoy reality as it is, in this very the moment, but stripped of
our false ideas of happiness. We close our eyes, breathe deeply, ignore our thinking, and enjoy
the blissful nothingness within.