brave love in ordinary time
a homily near the Feast of St. Phoebe
In honor of this week’s Feast of St. Phoebe, I was invited to share a reflection at Sunday Mass.1
Last month, I joined the Paulist Fathers on Deacons Pod, where they asked me about my experiences stepping into Catholic pulpits as a woman. I told them the truth: it often feels like pressure. Because the opportunities are rare, each one feels like it carries extra weight.
As I prepared for today, I carried that same question with me: what witness can a woman bring on this day that draws from Scripture and speaks truth with courage? My homily is one attempt at that, and I offer it here with the hope that it invites you, too, to consider how we might all bear witness to a discipleship that reorders our lives, to a faith that calls for nothing less than big, brave love.
Friends, today’s strange readings find us in the middle of Ordinary Time.
Here, in Ordinary Time, as we find our rhythm in a new month and a new school year, as our routines soften from novelty into knowing, Jesus jolts us with a pretty provocative call: hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters.
Jesus doesn’t indulge his creative flair for parables and metaphors here; he’s direct in naming the cost of discipleship. Will you leave it all behind? Would you lose it all? Would you count the cost and do it anyway?
The word “hate” catches our attention at the top of today’s Gospel – but I don’t think today’s Gospel is about hate as much as it is about the cost of love.
Earlier this summer, when the ICE raids began in our city, Father Brendan Busse—Jesuit priest, LMU alum, pastor of Dolores Mission, a person known and loved by many folks here—said on the news, in the company of Mayor Bass, and in support of the students of Dolores Mission School who felt scared and vulnerable: we will be brave with our love, we will be brave with our love. That’s what discipleship demands: brave love. Not comfortable love. Not convenient love. Brave love.
Now, most days, I am not brave with my love.
On my better days, I am generous with my love. I might be sweet, or kind, or patient with my love. On my best days, I might be magnanimous, visionary, selfless with my love. But not brave. Seldom brave.
On most days, I’m stingy, petty, scrupulous with my love.
In the economy of love, I’m all fast fashion and quick fix. Or I’m saving up for a rainy day. But I’m not risky. I’m not investing. I don’t think I’m very brave.
I have a toddler.
My family and I like to sit in the transept over here for the 10 AM Mass, but in this season of life, my son’s naptime runs from about 9:30–11, so it wouldn’t do anyone any good for us to join you for this holy Sunday morning hour. Parents among us know that a complicated gift of parenting babies is that everything is fleeting and short-lived. Which is to say, if you’re in a phase of parenthood you loathe, don’t worry—it’ll be over soon. And if you’re in a season of parenthood you adore, you better cherish it before you blink and your kiddo is on to something new.
Which is to say, 10 AM transept crew, we’ll be back before you know it.
’Til then –
My son’s birth last summer was extraordinarily complicated. He arrived late, and the birth was long, and after much intervention and incredible effort—on both my own behalf and that of the medical professionals to whom our lives were entrusted—things took a sudden turn—my son, quite literally—and he was born via emergency C-section that wasn’t without consequence for the both of us. We went from having the delivery cart at the end of the bed, and my soft playlist filling the room, and lights calm and low, to a fluorescent, echoing surgical theater pulsing with an urgency that I had no choice but to spread my arms and surrender to. I felt so powerless and defeated and out of control, but as I’ve been reminded time and again in the months since, that surrender was very brave.
Complications continued for both myself and my son in the days after his arrival into the world. We’re both healthy now, but I’m still making sense of what happened in the wee hours of that August morning. It was desperate and vulnerable and not without risk. I left it all on the operating table. Perhaps this is brave love.
Last night as my son was falling asleep, his toddler body wrapped around mine and his drool pooling in my shirt, I smelled the sunscreen left behind his ears and felt the softness of his hair against my nose. I don’t think one needs to be a parent to know the visceral affection for another person that familiarizes you with their texture, their scent. And I thought of him, and I thought of the world he’s learning to take his first steps in, and I wondered if I am in fact brave with my love as I, consciously or not, build the world he is living in.
Am I brave with my love when children not much older than he is are killed while praying in school? Am I brave with my love in this Season of Creation when the earth groans, and instead of doing anything to stop it, I continue to spring for overnight shipping on Amazon Prime? Am I brave with my love when I know my friendships, my workplace, my community, my city, my world could look more like the “thy kingdom come” that we’ll pray for in just a few minutes—but they don’t? And I don’t do much about that?
Again – I’m petty, I’m scrupulous. Perhaps I’m generous or sweet, or even visionary.
But am I brave?
The call to discipleship reorders our lives. Unless we answer that call and reorder our love and our lives in this—in this ordinary time, in our routines and relationships here and now—with the courage to show up with our whole heart, to know the cost and reorder it all anyway; we will continue to fall short. Myself included.
So where might we surrender to this call, vulnerable and desperate in a world that has taken a turn and demands the risk of love and nothing less? Where might we let the call to discipleship upend and break open and reorder our lives so we can follow Jesus more closely, more faithfully, more courageously?
Where might we be brave with our love—even in ordinary time? How can we be brave with our love?
Will we be brave with our love?
I just keep reading and re-reading this, and I hope many more are doing the same. Brave words, actions, and love.
Took my breath away. I want to be brave in my love too. ❤️