This is one of those Sundays when I cannot resist commenting on a distinctive aspect of our liturgy. So if this is too nerdy for you, I invite you to quietly pray a decade of the rosary and tune back in at the end.
Did you notice our collect of the day? In the Mass of Paul VI, this collect—in a very different translation—appears on the twenty-first Sunday of ordinary time. But we get it here in the middle of Eastertide:
O Almighty God, who alone makest the minds of the faithful to be of one will: grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.
This is a very old prayer, probably well established by the middle of the first millennium. Our liturgy retains it in the place where it was used for most of the last two thousand years. The Pauline rite moves it to early fall; the more recent Anglicans pushed it into Lent, but they also further revised it a hundred years after it was first translated, in light of the English civil war. Rather than “who alone makest the minds of the faithful to be one will,” the 1662 prayer book has “who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men.”
That’s the version a lot of us from the Anglican tradition will remember. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that content, but it makes sense that in our missal, Holy Mother Church has restored the original version.
As I say, the collect is very old, and it’s possible that it riffs on a line of St. Augustine of Hippo—or perhaps he is riffing on the collect, it’s hard to say—in his Confessions, where he says, “Give what you command, command what you will.”
As that great saint knew in the fifth century, so we know today: knowing a commandment is not the same as wanting to do it. Knowing God’s promises is not the same as wanting them.
Human desires are . . . complicated. At times simple. At times unaccountable. Why we want what we want when we want it—well, if we knew that, we would master the universe. Or not, because knowing about it isn’t enough; knowledge and desire remain distinct. Maybe I want to eat lunch at the local deli; maybe I want to make myself a salad at home; maybe I want not to make a decision; maybe I want to be alone, or to see a certain someone. And I know all sorts of things about these scenarios, and whether or not they are good or bad or neutral, but this doesn’t change the fundamental structure of desire and will. Desire, knowledge, and will can be friends, or enemies, or frenemies, but they simply are the structure of human thought and action.
All these human things are part of the “sundry and manifold changes of the world.” Because we are part of the world. Creation is, by definition, changeable. It didn’t exist. Now it does. To exist in time is to change. So where in the weirdness of human knowledge and will and desire is there any sense of stability if not in the one human being who is also eternal: the man who is both changeable and not changeable, who can suffer and also not suffer, who can be born and is yet eternal? The “joy” to be found in him is precisely in this paradox: that Jesus Christ is the one who knows our temporality, our changeability, our crazy unpredictable desires, and who is at the same time the one who knows (and is) absolute goodness and truth and beauty. He is where our hearts can be fixed—because he is exactly that link between the unchanging reality of God and the changing fluidity of human nature.
In other words, he is the vine. That is the image our Lord gives in John. Our connection with him—through baptism, and the Eucharist, as Jesus says—is the only way to have real life.
But what if we’re not sure if we want that life? What if we wonder about other forms of life that seem appealing, cut off from the vine, which is Christ and his Church? Here’s where St. John’s epistle from today comes in: “Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.”
Let’s be clear: John isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what we say or what we think. He’s saying that words and knowledge are never separate from action and feeling. If we want to feel a certain way and desire certain things, we have to do things. Belief and desire—those mysterious parts of human consciousness—largely follow from what we do. How we act, what we do, changes what we think and feel and believe.
So maybe there’s that occasional Sunday when we wake up thinking, You know, I don’t feel like going to Mass today. Or there’s that moment when you really want to do something, but you know it’s immoral. Guess what: go to Mass anyway. Flee from immorality. Your feelings and desire can catch up with your actions much faster than your actions can catch up with your feelings and desires.
Regular, habitual confession can be like this. If you just go to confession regularly, whether or not you feel like it, you may eventually start to want it, and that desire for penance and holiness can have huge consequences for how you actually live in the meantime.
Think of the vine and the branches. Does the branch want to remain connected to the vine? It’s a ridiculous question, because plants do not want things in the way that we want things. They simply do what they do. And that is exactly the power of this analogy. We are never going to love doing the right thing until we start doing the right thing.
And the first right thing, the most important and basic right thing, is to stay connected with Jesus. Maybe we don’t love him as we ought. Maybe we know that; maybe we don’t. But amid the sundry and manifold changes of this world, he is the place where joy can be found. All other joys, all other goods, follow from this good, from this joy: to be nourished on the vine of the Lord. In receiving him, we become what we are, and we become more capable of being what we are: of knowing and loving and living the fruitful life that God has given us.