When the Lord has given you the bread of suffering and the water of distress, he who is your teacher will hide no longer, and you will see your teacher with your own eyes. Whether you turn to right or left, your ears will hear these words behind you, ‘This is the way, follow it.’ You will regard your silvered idols and gilded images as unclean. You will throw them away like the polluted things they are, shouting after them, ‘Good riddance!’ - Is 30:20-22
. . . By loving us and holding us so dear, he stirred us to love him who had first loved us to the end.
And this is clearly the reason: you first loved us so that we might love you--not because you needed our love but because we could not be what you created us to be except by loving you. - from a discourse On the Contemplation of God, William of St. Thierry, abbot
Except on the great feast days, it is rare that I find the two passages from the Office of Readings to be so harmonious with each other. Often will both speak to me, but rarely do they convey related messages. But in this case the second reading strikes squarely upon the first.
Our modern silvered idols and gilded images are varied, and we rarely consider them aright to be anything that we ought to cast aside. Often we approach discussions of God's will in these areas of our lives as if what we want is of course what God wants for us, provided we even grant God the slightest dominion over such vast swaths of our lives as our careers, our entertainment, our social life, our finances, our possessions or our relationships. It is this haughty refusal to commit these arenas to God's authority that allows them to become strongholds of idolatry in our lives. God wants us to cast our entire lives into his care, and to throw away that which removes us from his will for us. One translation I encountered today renders the words "polluted things" as "menstrual rags," and while that may grant an undue degree of scorn to a natural biological process, it is worth noting how the more graphic latter image conveys how we ought to treat our idols, as well as their true value.
When we hear the words "The Lord is a jealous God," we insist on interpreting the words according to our standards of jealousy. God is jealous for our sake, not for his own. Lacking no thing, he is not lessened by our lack of worship, by our refusal to grant him dominion over us. We buy into the worldly notion that God wants to deprive us of fun - be it in the form of the latest gadgets, the nicest house, the pursuit of fun as an end in itself, the expression of our sexuality in the ways that we think are appropriate - and to demand obeisance from us. This idea that God tells us how to live only because God loves us and knows what is best for us seems not quite trustworthy to us. Maybe this is partly because we know that, sometimes at least, we direct our children's actions based on what will least interfere with our interests? God is not that sort of Father to us.
No, God directs us in the ways that lead us to become the sons and daughters that he dreams for us to be, and our resistance to God's direction, our clinging to those menstrual rags, keeps us bound up as a self that is so much less.
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