24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

The Chamber of Commerce calls this the shoulder season. Now that Labor Day is behind us, things begin to slow down a bit around Chatham. Yes, more tour buses are rumbling through town, but they and their passengers tend to only stop at the lighthouse for pictures, maybe get lunch on Main Street, and are on their way. If you have been hosting family and friends during the summer, they are back at school or home, and you can relax a bit and return to your routine. I hear some parishioners are now taking vacations of their own. It is time to get some breathing room.

Last week I began a series of Fall homilies called "Breathing Room." Since I celebrated the masses at Our Lady of Grace last weekend, I’ll bring you up to speed on what I talked about. Breathing Room is that gap between our current pace of life and our limits, and it is the space we give ourselves to relax a bit and take stock of our state of being or catch our wind. 

With breathing room, we have a little bit of money left over at the end of the month and aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. We aren’t racing from commitment to commitment without enough time to think about what we are doing. Giving ourselves some breathing room means we have some time at the end of the day and can provide emotional and mental energy to be present with our loved ones and share some conversation. When we allow ourselves breathing room, we get restful sleep at night. 

Life has its limits. We have only twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. No matter how gifted we are, there are limits to our talents. We all need time to recharge our energy. Yes, there are times when it is good to push our boundaries. On occasion, when the need arises, it is good to extend ourselves. It can even help us grow as a person by making an extraordinary sacrifice on occasion. 

But if we always live life to its limits or beyond, it will catch up with us, and disaster will strike. Bad things happen when we don’t allow ourselves some breathing room. Marriages and friendships suffer and often fall apart. We miss opportunities to enjoy the best of life, and addictions to vices develop. Never giving ourselves the breathing room we need leads to illness and even sudden death. 

In recent months we have been hearing about the big quit. One of the consequences of the pandemic has been the realization by many workers that they need more breathing room. Before COVID, many workers overextended themselves. They were working beyond their limits out of fear of losing their jobs or a promotion. The pandemic helped them realize their limitations. Workers today demand more job flexibility and are only willing to apply themselves within the boundaries of their work day. Actually, The Big Quit is beneficial for productivity, and many studies find that encouraging breathing room makes employees more satisfied and successful. 

When we give ourselves breathing room, we find what we are doing more enjoyable and are more successful at what we are doing. We may remember times in our lives when we were very busy and accomplishing a great deal, but because we were giving ourselves breathing room, our relationships flourished, and we had time for others. 

When we have room to breathe in our lives, we are kinder. We take notice of others and are more aware of their needs and feelings. We can take the time to be flexible and consider new possibilities rather than respond to urgent demands on our time. 

Most importantly, when we give ourselves breathing room, we have time to work at being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Being faithful to God requires time for prayer, reflection, and good works, and it needs space to listen to and act upon God’s message to us. I’ll talk about that more in the weeks ahead. 

Life is much less stressful and chaotic when we set aside time to catch our breath, but we must be intentional about making that happen. I awakened in the early morning on Monday. While I tried to get back to sleep, I began to think about all the commitments and obligations coming up last week. I kept reminding myself not to forget this or that. I asked myself when I could have time to prepare for every activity I had planned. It felt like I’d be pushed to my limit during the coming week. Of course, I lost sleep that night, but the first thing I did the next morning, even before I showered, was to sit down to put on paper all of my commitments. Once I did that, I could see there would be time to breathe during the week, and I became more relaxed.

What can we do when we feel we are pushing our limits? Today’s famous Parable of the Prodigal Son gives us direction. The story is well known. It begins with a man who has two sons. The younger one asks for his share of the father’s estate. Even today that sounds rather bold and hurtful, but in Jesus’ day, it was even more so. For a son to ask his father for his inheritance was to say, “I wish you were dead.” It would have been shocking. Even more astounding was the father’s response; he gave the boy what he wanted, and the son promptly exchanged it for cash and was on his way. 

The Gospel tells us that the young man set out for a distant land. He went as far away from his family as possible and lived a life of dissipation. In other words, he went to Vegas and used up all his money. Things turned terrible. The land experienced famine, and he couldn’t get a decent job. He had absolutely no breathing room. The only employment available to him was feeding swine. For a Jew, that job would have meant he sank to the lowest of the low. The job didn’t even provide food for the son. 

If we are truthful, many of us can identify with the young son. We recognize that, at times, we have wandered away from God the Father and struck out on our own without regard to hurting our relationship with God. We have embraced sinfulness without considering its damage to our relationship with God. We have lied to ourselves and believed we could live independently without God’s grace. Then we lose all of our breathing room and discover life is too big and complicated to try to go it alone.

Maybe we are in that kind of situation right now. Our financial condition overwhelms us because we are overextended and in debt. We were undisciplined in our lifestyle and now have no financial breathing room. Our schedules might have us frazzled with no time to ourselves. We or others have placed too many obligations on us, and we feel like we are on a treadmill with no way to get off. We might be emotionally overextended and allow a minor aggravation to set us off in anger. 

Jesus’ parable outlines three steps that we need to take when we feel we have no room to breathe. Luke tells us Jesus said the younger son came to his senses and reminded himself the hired workers on his father’s farm weren’t living that way. The son recognized his life didn’t have to be this way, and he realized his pain was greater than the pain of humbly returning to his father. 

When we are gasping for breath, we must realize we don’t have to live this way. Living beyond our means isn’t mandatory. Our children playing on every sports team isn’t unavoidable, and living at an unsustainable pace isn’t normal. As your pastor, I need to tell you the truth, and you need to stop playing the victim. You have the power to take control of your life and give yourself room to breathe. It is time to take personal responsibility for our problems and failures. 

The prodigal son finally realized that and headed home. He tells himself he will rise up and go to his father. The son realizes he can’t do it alone and has to stop trying. Yes, he will have to face the possibility of humiliation, but it is a risk he must be willing to take. Facing the difficult process of realizing we need help and taking concrete steps to get help can feel embarrassing but is necessary.

It is a journey that begins with prayer, but it won’t be a quick prayer that suddenly turns the tide and makes everything better again. Remember, the son was living in a distant country. It was a long journey home; surely, the son felt like giving up hope and courage at times. Our prayer must be steadfast and persistent. We’ll have to do it every day.

If you don’t pray on a daily basis, start small. Begin with as little as ten minutes. Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed or distracted. The church is open for prayer every day, beginning around 7 am, and we close around 3 pm. Lay your problem before God, and then take the time to listen. Consider doing some reading from scripture. I encourage people to begin scripture reading with the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In it, Luke relates how the early  Christians grew in prayer and were able to respond to God in faith. Using the Book of Psalms with our prayers is also good. 

The third action the Prodigal Son took was to prepare to ask forgiveness. As he starts his journey, he prepares the speech he wants to recite to his father.

“I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned

against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son;

Treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers.'”

The younger son owns up to his faults and failures and admits he can’t exist on his terms. Our prayer to the Father for breathing room requires we surrender to God, recognize that we have tried to do things our way, and realize we can’t live on our own. 

The rest of the parable tells us about the father’s reaction. The father recognizes the younger son while still far off and sacrifices his dignity by running to him. He embraces and kisses him. He won’t even give the young man time to utter his speech of apology but calls his servants and tells them to give the prodigal son all the trappings of membership in his family.  

At the beginning of this mass, like the prodigal son, we made a short request for God’s mercy and forgiveness of our sins. Then we sat to listen and hear about God’s compassion for all of us. In a few minutes, we begin the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Then we will receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ our Savior. In that Eucharist, God will grant us the gift of grace, the gift of breathing room to worship Him, do good works and bring God’s blessing with us this week.