Balaam's Donkey

St. Luke drawing the Virgin
Rogier van der Weyden
From Wikimedia.

I'm steadily chipping away at writing a set of Advent reflections for 2020, and yesterday was dancing with this reading from Numbers, featuring the beleaguered Balaam dragged from mountain top to mountain top in hopes he would eventually say what people wanted to hear. Meanwhile, on my own reading list is Balaam's Donkey, an eclectic collections of reconstructed homilies by Cistercian Michael Casey OCSO.

Casey's book is a "daily devotional" in the sense that there is an entry for each day, but the entries are not keyed to the lectionary or even to the liturgical seasons. Given that I am so often writing out of  time and season, I am always delighted to find someone else to wander this trackless desert with me.

Today's entry was titled "Service" and the last paragraph made me think of the Church's current struggles to speak with authority (a theme clearly sounded in the Advent pericopes I am working with) in the modern world.

"Sometimes the service that needs to be rendered is the offering of advice or correction.  My first abbot used to insist that this will work only if persons in authority have a solid history of genuine concern for the welfare of the other."  (from Balaam's Donkey, by Michael Casey OCSO p 377)

Electronic rosaries aren't going to cut it. Nor are strident "no true Scotsman" arguments about what it means to be Catholic and only if we were louder and more unbending will we be appreciated. To be heard as a voice of truth, one first must genuinely live out that truth.

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Happy feast of St. Luke!