Homily for Ordinary Time 15 - July 10, 2022

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 15

July 10, 2022

The Greatest Epidemic

 

            Mother Teresa was once taken on a tour of a nursing home in America. The nursing home director was telling her all about the state-of-the-art facility: round-the-clock skilled nursing care, good food, TVs in every room, plenty of comfort. But the saint noticed that no one was smiling and that they were all looking toward the door. She asked the director why everyone was staring at the door, and the director sadly responded that they were all waiting for a visit from family or friends, but only rarely did anyone come to visit them.

            From this experience, Mother Teresa concluded that there was a poverty in America that was worse than the poverty in Calcutta. She said, “The greatest poverty is loneliness, the feeling of being unwanted.” In Calcutta, people were starving – but they knew how to share what little they had, and this love brought them joy. Here in America, we have everything – and so often are miserable because we do not have the meaningful connections that make life worthwhile.

            A recent study found that 61% of Americans are lonely. There is a yearning in every human heart for connection. We are created for relationships, because we are made in the image of God Who is Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the original community of life and love, and since we are made in His image, we too desire to be part of a community of life and love. Thus, we recognize that something is deeply wrong when we are isolated, lonely, unloved. As Pope St. John Paul II said, “The only proper response to another human being is love.”

            As we reflect on this parable of the Good Samaritan, it strikes me that in our country we do not see people beat up by the side of the road. We don’t see people literally starving in the streets. We have enough soup kitchens and homeless shelters and government programs and charities to help most people live decent lives. Yes, we should continue to contribute to charities that help the poor, but most of us do not have a daily encounter with people who are lacking material goods.

            But the poverty we encounter daily is the poverty of loneliness. Perhaps our grandparents, who are isolated in a nursing home…perhaps a kid at school who always sits alone…perhaps a neighbor who has no family left. This is the needy person that we encounter daily.

            And the choice of how to respond to such a poverty is up to us. If I were to rewrite this parable for our modern world, it would go something like this: a person got beat up, not by robbers, but by life…perhaps they were the victim of online cyberbullying, or maybe their kids moved away from home and have ignored them. And so, they sat there by the side of the road, lonely and hurting. A person passed by, but was too distracted looking at their smartphone to notice. Another person passed by, but they were so busy working eighty hours a week and driving their kids to soccer practice that they couldn’t take time to help. Finally, a Christian, a true believer in Christ, noticed this person who had been forgotten by the rest of the world. They stopped, and got to know the other person’s name, and invited them out for coffee – nothing earth-shattering, but it broke through the loneliness and isolation. The person began to get well simply by meaningful human connection.

            I challenge us all to look around in our own life and see who could use a card, a phone call, an invitation over. Is it your grandma? Your neighbor? Your classmate? That person that you see sitting all by themselves in the pew in front of you?

            Once, a pair of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity went to visit a very poor man up in the mountains of Australia. When they came to his house, they were noticed a beautiful lamp sitting in the living room, covered in dust. The lamp was all dark – no light came from it. The nuns asked the man why he didn’t light the lamp, and he said, “I never get any visitors. I have no reason to light the lamp.” The nuns said, “If we visit you every week, will you light the lamp for us?” The man agreed, and he began to light the lamp…and through these visits, he himself became changed. He began to go out to visit his neighbors and return to church. Years later, long after the nuns had stopped visiting him, he wrote a letter to Mother Teresa and told her, “The lamp that your sisters had lit in my life continues to shine.”

            We have very little chance, on a daily basis, to encounter a man beaten by robbers. But almost every day we encounter someone who suffers from the epidemic of loneliness – and the cure doesn’t cost us even two gold coins – just a little time and love.