Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I’ve preached a couple times on what it means to be seen, on the idea that how we’re seen influences how (and whom) we become. We are who we are, we become who we are because of the people around us. We are who we are because our communities create us.

This may lead us to ask the question, though: who are we when no one’s looking? Who are we when we’re unaware of the expectations of others that can be so difficult and even painful to manage, live into or challenge? Who are we when no one’s looking?

Our Office Gospel today is about this question. It’s also about whose vision of us really matters.

Jesus talks about folks who give very publically, pray very publically, fast very publically as folks who’ve confused what it means to be seen as good with what it means to actually be good. And since they’re not interested in actually being good, they’ve gotten precisely what they’ve wanted (whether or not they’ve known they’ve wanted it)—they’re merely seen as good.

But goodness isn’t a matter of a one-off extravagant gift or a single loud and long-winded prayer or a theatrical fasting routine. Goodness is about the shape of a life, a wholeness of life, in which being and seeming, inner and outer, inform each other and comport with each other.

This is why the advice is to do all these things (give, pray, fast) in secret has a twofold importance. The first is so that our giving and praying and fasting is not be dependent on or informed by either the regard or expectation of others. These are things we do, in other words, because we are that sort of people, a people who engage in giving and praying and fasting because they form the fundamental warp and woof of our lives. We’re not compelled to do them, but doing them is as natural as breathing. We do them because they are us.

The second importance of doing these things in secret is rooted in that idea that who we are and become has everything to do with relationship, with whose vision of us is informing our lives. Because the truth of the matter is, we cannot be or become the sort of person for whom giving and praying and fasting is as natural as breathing unless we allow ourselves to be shaped by God’s graceful and loving vision of us and for us. There is no wholeness of life without this literally divine, literally beatific, vision of what it means to be human, revealed to us in its fullness in Jesus Christ. If we allow God’s vision to shape our giving, our praying, our fasting, we will find ourselves shaped into that vision’s likeness—in allowing ourselves to be seen by God and shaped by that graceful seeing, we will become the image and the likeness of the One who sees us. Our inner life: Jesus. Our outer life: Jesus. Our private life: Jesus. Our public life: Jesus. Our lives whole because of the One who gives us his own wholeness of life: Jesus.

When Jesus speaks of doing these things in secret, then, he isn’t speaking of doing them furtively or on the sly, or making sure it’s all hidden, as if no good can be done unless it’s anonymous. He’s talking about our goodness not being a function of the public gaze, a gaze which fundamentally, consistently, and indefatigably misconstrues and misidentifies the good. We cannot, we will not, be or do the good we are called to be and do if we are not shaped by God’s loving vision of us…a vision which looks like Jesus Christ.

How might we, today, find ourselves given, by grace, to this vision? How might this vision become our own? How might we discover ourselves, even and especially when no one's looking, becoming, by grace, more like Jesus?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+