Limiting Your Options

“Then Jesus said to him, ‘Begone, Satan! for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’”  St. Matthew 4:10

It was great to see last week that my college friend John has finally gotten engaged.  I found out the way the way you often do about these things when you’re my age, when a notice popped up halfway down my Facebook feed.  I haven’t seen John in two or three years, but he seemed about the same, his arm around a beautiful woman.  Both of them looked delighted, and frankly, a little relieved.

John’s all of 38 now, and after a conversation I had with him the last time we were together, I doubted that this day would ever come.  He was kind enough to put me up for the night in his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen the last time I was in New York.  John works in mergers and acquisitions at a big bank, knows a bit about everything, and has friends all over town.  Still no steady girlfriend, though. 

 “You don’t understand what it’s like dating here in the City,” John said to me over his plate of souvlaki.   A few months before he had signed up for Tinder, which was the hottest thing in dating technology at the time.  Tinder is sort of like internet matchmaking on steroids.  It sets up a date for you first thing in the morning by text message and you have an hour or two to decide if you’re in the mood for this option or if you’d like to try someone else instead.  

John had lots of dates.  I expect he had turned down two or three to have dinner with me. 

The Holy Madness of Giving

Zita of Lucca was a thirteenth-century house servant. Patient and responsible, she was given to meditation and heard Mass daily. But she was known and loved most of all for her generosity. Whatever Zita had, she gave away to the poor.

One cold morning, compelled by her master to wear his cloak on her journey to church, she met a beggar and wrapped the cloak around him without a moment’s hesitation. Returning home without it, she was roundly scolded. Later that day, a mysterious stranger appeared at the door, the master’s cloak in hand. Another time, called away from the kitchen while baking bread to attend to a sick woman, her fellow servants were amazed to discover a company of angels tending the ovens.

The lives of the saints abound with stories like these. Saint Brigid gave her father’s prized sword to a leper, and, after being exiled to a work in a dairy in response, she slipped dozens of hampers of butter out the side door. Elizabeth of Hungary was chased from her castle for pawning her jewels to build a hospital during a plague, while Robert Bellarmine scandalized Renaissance Rome by ripping the tapestries from his walls to have them cut up for clothing for the poor. The walls, he assured his fellow clerics, wouldn’t catch cold. Even Martin Luther, for all his hostility to works of supererogation, had to insist that his wife Katie keep the key to the family strongbox. Otherwise, he would be sure to give it all away.