Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our Office Reading from First Kings this morning tells the familiar story of the judgment of Solomon regarding a dispute between two women who both claim that an infant boy is their son.  The story is that the women share a home and, in a terrible accident, one of the women smothered her own infant in her sleep and subsequently switched her child’s lifeless body with her housemate’s living child.  Now, both are claiming the living infant as their own and each is accusing the other of negligence and kidnapping.  Solomon doesn’t know who the mother is, but he devises a test to find out: he’ll call for the child to be divided in two so each of the claimants will have something.  The woman who’s not the child’s mother says, “Fine!  Fair!”  The woman who is the child’s mother, in a bid to save the child’s life and prevent more needless death, drops her suit, gives up any claim, willingly offers to occupy the place of desolation instead of the other woman and for the good of her boy, and cries, “No!  Don’t hurt the child!  Give him to my rival.  He’s hers.  She’s the mother.”  Solomon recognizes these latter words as the words of someone who genuinely cares for the child, rules that the child is hers, and everyone’s amazed at Solomon’s ruling and the way by which he came to it. 

There’s a lot we could talk about in this story.  We could talk about parenthood being a matter of sacrificial investment in the good, the thriving, the wellbeing of a child, and we could move from there to a consideration of how love writ-more-broadly means a sacrificial investment in the good, the thriving, the wellbeing of another, whether neighbor or stranger.  And that would be a good thing to talk about! 

In the meantime, I want to draw attention to something a little more difficult.  Now, this isn’t mentioned in the story, but I don’t think it takes any great powers of empathy to imagine the horror, desperation, trauma, and fear that overwhelmed the first woman when she discovered that her baby was lifeless.  And I don’t think for a moment that exchanging her baby with her housemate’s was a cleverly devised rational plot, but a hasty and anguished act meant to shift onto another person a weight of fear, terror, emptiness and loss that she herself found unbearable, in which she was drowning.  She wanted to stop being in pain.  So she attempted to offload that pain onto another.

Beloved…how often do we do the same thing?  Our circumstances may be different from those of the desperate woman in our reading, but the mechanisms and methods by which we attempt to manage affliction, pain, fear of one sort or another are so often the same: we hurt others in an attempt to heal ourselves, to outsource our hurt so it no longer clings to us.  Simone Weil writes, “A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.  That is why we are inclined to commit such acts as a way of deliverance.”  And, in typical Weil fashion, she offers a difficult counterpoint: “Patience consists in not transforming suffering into crime.”

Dear Friend, how easy it is to offload what afflicts us onto others!  And how difficult to patiently inhabit the way of love, the way of self-giving, the way of seeking the good of another even above our perception of our own good!  How difficult, in other words, is the Way of the Cross, the way of divine exchange by which love chooses to step even into the place of lovelessness so that every place might overflow with love’s patiently abiding presence! 

Happily, Beloved, whatever the difficulty, we’re not left without the example of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Happily, we’re not without a community of grace that can hold us in our pain, in our affliction, that can help us seek not to offload our suffering onto another, but to bear each other’s burdens.  Happily, the way we’re called to walk is a way of mutual flourishing in love, which necessarily means justice, and necessarily leads to peace.  And happily, we’re freely given the grace to walk this way if (even in the midst of difficulty), we ask for it and open our hands to receive it.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+