And Now For Something Completely Different

Amy's most recent post, as usual, calls us back to our senses after our passionate wrangling over the election. This might be a good moment to post a reflection I was kindly invited to offer by Dean Lisa Kloppenberg at an Interfaith Prayer Service at the University of Dayton Law School earlier this month. Addressed primarily to lawyers, and entitled "Mountains of Desire," it is a meditation on the "faith that moves mountains" passage in Matthew. Its point might be equally applicable to the mountains that we Catholic intellectuals build. This is prtty amateur homilectics, but I would appreciate any comments.

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON SCHOOL OF LAW
INTERFAITH PRAYER SERVICE
October 14, 2004

Mountains of Desire
Mark A. Sargent

Matthew 17: 19-20 “Amen, I say to you if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

You don’t need faith to move mountains. Nature is taking care of that for us in Washington State, where it is busily relocating Mount St. Helen’s. We human beings can also blow up mountains, or tunnel through them, making new mountains out of their debris. So we don’t need faith to move that kind of mountain. The mountains that Jesus refers to in our reading, I think, are harder to move. They are bigger and more durable. They offer little purchase to the mustard seeds of faith that try to grow in their stony, arid soil.
These mountains are also hard to move because they are hard to see. We often don’t even know they are there. They grow slowly and imperceptibly. They don’t appear suddenly after some personal earthquake; they expand through the slow, but constant accretions deposited in our souls by daily life, as we go about our business, as we do the things we are accustomed to do. These mountains are the deposits of the normal.
These mountains of the heart are metaphors, of course, but they are still real. Much as an actual range of mountains they separate, they stand between one side and another, and they prevent those standing on this side from reaching, or even seeing, the other side. The mountains in our hearts are those that separate us from our hearts’ true desire. They are the mountains built from the desires that cannot satisfy or be satisfied. Among lawyers, they swell up from our pride and ambition: our arrogance, our idolatry of work, our love of victory, our love of the legal and our indifference to the moral, and our love of the wealth and power our profession can bring us. These mountains fracture our integrity, the wholeness that should link our faith, our values, our personal lives and our professional lives.
For Saint Augustine, whom we talk about at Augustinian Villanova all the time, achieving happiness depends upon what one loves or, more precisely, what one chooses to desire. In the Confession’s parable of the stolen pears, St. Augustine shows how he stole something he really did not want (he had plenty of fruit) because it pleased him to steal. He loved the pleasure of transgression, which ultimately shamed him. And so we, in our self-absorption and pride, also find ourselves loving and desiring things which, if we really knew ourselves, if we were really attentive to our hearts, we would not really want. Instead, we build mountains of desire, and those mountains stand between us and our true selves, our true desires, our need for communion, our desire for God.
Can we move those mountains ourselves? Maybe. As Augustine tells us, the first step is to choose carefully what to love. But Augustine, that great poet of introspection, the doctor of interiority, who truly knew himself, also believed that we need God’s grace for our faith to move mountains, so that the tiny mustard seeds of faith may take root and cause the mountains to crumble, and allow us to see, albeit through a glass darkly, our world transfigured.