Today’s find: Re-roofed

The shingles were flying, floating, fluttering from every corner of our roof the other day, so we figured the prudent choice was to just stay inside.

It’s an odd feeling though – the sense that you’re a bit of a prisoner in your own home. You get used to coming and going, without ever giving airborne detritus a second thought.

On its best days, indeed on most days, you come to think of your home as a veritable sanctuary. A place of refuge. On this day, it seemed to have joined the other side: actively targeting my peace of mind.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. Just the opposite: I feel blessed to have a brand-new topper atop my abode…and blessed, too, to have seen (well, mostly just “heard”) the hard-working crew members plying their trade. They put in an extraordinarily long day – arriving before dawn, leaving after sunset, and then returning for a bit of clean-up at dawn the next day. They spoke a language that’s unfamiliar to me, I noticed: industriousness and physicality and fleetness and endurance. All in all, it’s truly a marvel to witness the fruits of their hard work.

And having come close to this phenomenon occurring overhead, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the life lessons a new roof offers. Perfect timing, too, since this week’s scripture seems intent on turning our eyes upward. 

In the second reading at Mass, Saint James reminds us that “every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights…” Still, he cautions us not to think of God’s gifts as merely a shield – a new roof set in place to ward off worldly elements that might assail us. Rather, we are called to interiorize these gifts, to let them mold our hearts: “Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls. Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.”

It’s a teaching that James must have picked up from Jesus himself, because the Lord, too, warns against taking too much stock in externalities:

“Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”

Hunkered down in our own little worlds, it may seem like the gravest dangers we face come from the outside. But there are very real dangers that lie within our hearts – sinful patterns and self-centered impulses that keep us from becoming as bold as Jesus desires us to be. 

There comes a time to tear off the shingles, and expose this darkness in our hearts to the light. Then bathed in Christ’s healing mercy, we can perhaps sign on to His crew – and begin to spend our days working alongside Him to build something new, to help make His Kingdom come.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS