Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

So as it turns out…I’m getting over a cold as I’m writing this. Which is not particularly pleasant, but certainly more pleasant than having just come down with something!

It seems every time I get sick, regardless of the severity of the illness, I’m tempted to see the whole world as a labyrinthine miasma of contagion that I was unsuccessful in navigating healthily. And I find myself committing and re-committing to whatever behaviors (whether reasonable or absurd) I can think of to keep myself unspotted by the world.

While there’s certainly nothing whatsoever wrong with hygienic practices, the difficulties with this way of approaching the world are manifold…particularly when/if we understand all of this in moral terms. For starters, it suggests that being ill is something like a moral failure. It isn’t. We’re frail creatures. Despite our most prudent efforts, sometimes we break. Sometimes we fall ill. And that’s just life.

But there’s something more insidious at work, here, too. There’s a hint in this sort of thinking that I, in myself, am a kind of singularly pure little island in the midst of a sea of impure and contagious multiplicity; that I, in myself, am whole and healthy and the world represents so many incursions upon that wholeness and health; that I and the world are fundamentally foreign to each other.

Jesus, in our reading from Mark today, has no truck with such ideas. It’s not what’s outside us but “what comes out of a person that defiles,” he says. Sure, physical illness can come from outside of us, but however poorly it may make us feel, it doesn’t defile us. Insofar as there’s any moral contagion at work here, insofar as anything can be said to degrade or deface or obscure the image of God in us, it doesn’t come from outside: its source is the fallen human heart, not the created world, not contact with our neighbors, our friends, our enemies, not the demonic or angelic worlds, not anything outside of us at all, but our own wayward hearts that are so powerfully problematic.

In fact, it is only on account of the Outside, on account of the Other that real wholeness is possible. We can’t be whole in and of ourselves. We need community to be whole. Our perfection as human beings is not something that comes from us sui generis, but is something we discover in relationship with others and with God. In fact, our very salvation depends on receiving a grace that comes from Outside of us and that is nonetheless more essential to us, to our human flourishing and becoming, than we could ever rightly or exhaustively know.

The reality of who and what we are is that we were made for each other because we were made for God and in God’s likeness: in the likeness of the Divine One who is a loving community of Persons. We can’t be who we’re meant to be if we’re separated from each other, from the world around us, from God.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+