November 14

33d Sunday in Ordinary time   Mt.25//14-30

Like the parable of last Sunday this one has but a single point. Indeed the point is the same: don't expect God to be tolerant if you don't use your abilities because other people have more abilities than you.  Beyond that point allegories which try to assign explanations of the details of the story risk obscuring the thrust of the parable, the rifle shot ringing out in the night to surprise, shock, and awaken us and to tell us that excuses based on false and passive aggressive humility will cut no ice with God, at all, at  all.

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Once upon  a time there was a young woman who seemed to have a lot of talent as a writer. Her teachers in grammar school and high school told her that she was so clever with words, had such a vivid imagination, and could tell stories so wonderfully well that she could easily become a good and maybe a great novelist. She really didn't believe them. I'm no different from anyone else, she kept saying. I don't want to be different from anyone else.  Writers are different, so I'm not a writer. Her family agreed. What will people say?  They asked when she told them that maybe she ought to be a writer. Who do you think you are they said that you should be a writer. What do you know about life. Some of the young men she dated thought she was a genius. She didn't want to be a genius, she just wanted to be like everyone else. So she dated boys who didn't think she was a genius and laughed at the suggestion that she ought to be a writer. Yet deep down in her heart she knew she was talented, she new she could be a greater writer and thought that maybe she should be.   In her quiet momments she even kind of wanted to be  a writer. But her family and her new boy friends just laughed at her. So she gave up any thought of writing. She married and had a couple of kids and felt very unhappy and unfulfilled and divorced her husband and became an alcoholic. Maybe I should have been a writer she said finally. But by then it was too late.