I wanted to include the following response from a friend of mine who contacted me directly regarding the piece from Anthony the Great. I appreciate her honesty!
"I identify with the man who dialogs with Anthony the Great in that I often struggle to offer (willingly and lovingly) even a "brew of corn" to one who could benefit from it. In excuse I am wont to intone, "I'm just not a chicken soup kind of person," implying, I suppose, that I inhabit some kind of loftier spiritual plane.
Perhaps I'm not alone in experiencing this reluctance, and in addition, adducing it to prove my inability to meet the high bar Jesus requires of us in his Sermon on the Mount. At such times I've found it helpful to remember the testimony of a speaker I once heard at a women's conference who said that often the best she could do was to 'want to want to want to want to . . .' do what was required. I think I've experienced that somehow Jesus accepts the mustard seed-sized grain of faith buried in that ellipsis and grants me the grace to please him, whether I offer the bowl of soup, a prayer, or just my 'want to.'"
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking to Galilean peasants whose land is under Roman military occupation. People whose backs are against the wall tend to hear the Sermon on the Mount as great good news, because it offers a way out of oppression into human dignity. People with even a little to hold onto tend to hear the Sermon on the Mount as a threat and are ready to dismiss it as an impossibly high standard. To borrow a line from Bob Dylan, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”
I wanted to include the following response from a friend of mine who contacted me directly regarding the piece from Anthony the Great. I appreciate her honesty!
"I identify with the man who dialogs with Anthony the Great in that I often struggle to offer (willingly and lovingly) even a "brew of corn" to one who could benefit from it. In excuse I am wont to intone, "I'm just not a chicken soup kind of person," implying, I suppose, that I inhabit some kind of loftier spiritual plane.
Perhaps I'm not alone in experiencing this reluctance, and in addition, adducing it to prove my inability to meet the high bar Jesus requires of us in his Sermon on the Mount. At such times I've found it helpful to remember the testimony of a speaker I once heard at a women's conference who said that often the best she could do was to 'want to want to want to want to . . .' do what was required. I think I've experienced that somehow Jesus accepts the mustard seed-sized grain of faith buried in that ellipsis and grants me the grace to please him, whether I offer the bowl of soup, a prayer, or just my 'want to.'"
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking to Galilean peasants whose land is under Roman military occupation. People whose backs are against the wall tend to hear the Sermon on the Mount as great good news, because it offers a way out of oppression into human dignity. People with even a little to hold onto tend to hear the Sermon on the Mount as a threat and are ready to dismiss it as an impossibly high standard. To borrow a line from Bob Dylan, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”