a dropped Paul
on family & hospitality
On Sunday, the second reading was from the seventh chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, but if you were attending Mass alongside me Sunday morning in Raleigh, you wouldn’t have known that. Because we went right from the Responsorial Psalm to the Gospel, and the letter went unread.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that my body can be in a pew and my mind 4,000 miles away or 10 years in the past through most of—if not all of—a particular service, so my first thought was I had simply become a mental vacuum for the five minutes during which that reading should have happened.
But, no, the psalmist had just left the podium, and there was no lector taking her place to read Paul’s first letter to the Christians in Corinth, instead, everyone rose and stood up to sing alleluia after we had just been singing a psalm. Although my mind had not been very attentive, the muscle memory of sing-listen-sing-listen-sing-stand definitely noted a disruption in the pattern.
I did not, after Mass, ask the pastor why we had skipped Paul’s reading, although I wanted to. It may have been an error—I watched him take up the Gospels closely: did I detect a slight hesitation? A calculation of: do I stop this Mass machine in its tracks to read the second reading or do I keep going?
It’s possible everyone forgot. That’s true. It’s also possible that I am wrong and suffered from a massive stroke for five minutes and completely blacked out. Sometimes when people remind you of something that just simply fell between your synapses, it’s quite shocking. You realize there’s a lot more brain underneath the surface—a lot more you there—than you pay attention to in waking life.
But, well, in a church where “men” is often changed to “people,” and “synagogue” was once changed to “meeting place” (which, sure, is what it means after all), and Ephesians 5 was cut off before reaching the household codes, I wasn’t exactly surprised—I mean I was, though— that the seventh chapter from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians was dropped and was not addressed in the homily, either.
Now, the end of Paul’s seventh chapter in his first letter to the Corinthians goes something like this (give or take a translation):
Brothers and sisters:
I should like you to be free of anxieties.
An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord,
how he may please the Lord.
But a married man is anxious about the things of the world,
how he may please his wife, and he is divided.
An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord,
so that she may be holy in both body and spirit.
A married woman, on the other hand,
is anxious about the things of the world,
how she may please her husband.
I was at a Mass that featured the children’s choir and was filled with families. Just the sort of place where this message—on its surface—might land the most discordantly.
Paul is very uncomfortable to our twentieth-century ears. Either we tend to ignore or gloss over him, or—the more fundamentalist among us—read him at face value without bothering to note when his words were written or to whom.
Paul is so uncomfortable that, often, preachers don’t really dig into what he’s saying beyond scratching at the surface.
So, my first thought when listening to this reading—as I sat, dressed for a night of theatre in New York in the thick of families in suburban Raleigh—was really that the division was not between the virgin (as my book translated it) and the married person.
I mean, in Paul’s particular case—as he spends the seventh chapter giving very practical advice to a group of Christians in Corinth—he is making a division between the virgins and widows and the married people in Corinth.
But in our case, as we read it, do we really believe that those who take a vow of virginity or practice celibacy are somehow more focused on “the things of the Lord?” Are they really less anxious?
Most parish priests I have met—even if they are more concerned with preaching the Gospel than filling the collection plate—often seem like they are in very unhappy marriages where they are quite anxious about money and liability and the Cardinal breathing down their necks for more money and less liability.
Although they are practicing celibacy (ideally), I do not think most priests are free to be anxious about solely pleasing the Lord and doing the things of the Lord. Sometimes, it seems they would be much freer to live a life of virtue if they simply had a wife to please rather than a passel of diocesan bureaucrats. Even if she were a very demanding woman, simply on a numbers basis you’d be improving as you’d go from several dozen displeased bosses to only one.
Perhaps we have to look farther afield, to more angelic lives than those of the secular clergy in the hierarchy. But, even looking at religious orders of men and women, I see that monasteries possess a similar tension—there are those within them who worry about meeting bread production quotas and squeezing out every last available drop of income from guesthouses—and they find they are not entirely free to be anxious about things of the Lord.
Perhaps, as we, in our current world, read this selection of Paul’s that the lectionary has chosen for us, that we should read and not gloss over, perhaps what we can take from this is that each of our states of life is riven down the middle. We are so often anxious about what we are to eat and what we are to wear, even in our families, it’s true.
To be a virgin—to have a purity of heart—means that we have the integrity in ourselves to choose God rather than Mammon. But what good is it to sit in our virginal isolation? Christianity is not a religion of the individual but of the person—and a being that is communion and community. If we believe that Christianity is possible for a community—for the unity of brethren breaking bread and sharing all things in common—then it is possible for a community to have that integrity: to serve God rather than Mammon, to be anxious in our desire to love God in the face of our neighbor, to be preoccupied with loving rather than with our own self-preservation or welfare.
To practice hospitality is a beautiful, healing thing. To open your doors and see an unexpected guest walk through it—someone so unlike yourself, who didn’t go to the same schools or read the same books—is such a gift and an honor.
We are so used to novelty—thy name is Netflix—that we forget guests’ essential duty in expanding our world. To live a life with your door open to the world, to live a life that welcomes others into the house, that makes the unexpected stranger feel at home is a rich life. It’s a blessed life. Guests bring the honor and delight of the unexpected.
I have been practicing this hospitality here, at my grandmother’s house. And I realize that to practice hospitality in a place where you have memories of being 10 and 20 and 30; where there are pictures of you up on the wall as a toddler and an awkward tween with untweezed eyebrows and as a graduate; where your great-grandparents’ marriage license is decorating the wall—where you belong—well, pardon my French, but it’s fucking grounding.
I think of how Faris and I made maqluba for Da Jane after we all got our COVID vaccines and I think of how we brought Denise with us to the Ridgeway Cantelope Festival. Da Jane would love this, I think, watching everyone around the table. Stirring up the tadpole pool scum. Finding Christmas-sized pine trees in the woods.
And because we’re here, not somewhere far away, because the door I open up is hers, this is hers, too. Being dead means something different when you live your life inside and alongside of the memories of the deceased. And I think that’s what family means. Yes, it’s something you hold onto, even when you’re far away, but it’s something that roots you into the ground, something that holds you down in windstorms. It’s something you live inside—something that gives life the dimension of history.
History gives people the power and the confidence to do great things with their lives—young people especially need to know that their lives could be of world-historical significance—said a man I interviewed the other day. When we study history, we see these possibilities for ourselves.
When you open your doors to the world, it’s to bring the unexpected guest into the fold. It’s to bring them into your story, your heart, your pictures on the wall, and to let yours get tangled up and expanded—beyond your own limits—in theirs. That’s what history is made of. That’s what we’re born into: a bunch of tangled stories knotted up inside of us and around us. We are responsible for sorting through it all—it’d be nice if it had been done for us, but that is not what being human means—and weaving it all together into something new and yet quite old, something beautiful and rooted.