Fire and Ice:
The Highs and Lows of the Human Personality Since the Fall of the Forefathers; and the Hot and Cold in Human Relationships
by: Father Anthony Michaels
The following is a commentary on the Gospel reading for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost.
“For the righteous will never be moved; he will be remembered for ever. He is not afraid of evil tidings; his heart if firm, trusting in the Lord, His heart is steady, he will not be afraid, until he sees his desire on his adversaries.” (Ps. 112.6-8)
The Devil plays with our emotions the way Issac Perlman plays his violin, expertly. There is an old song by the “Spinners” called, “If you want to do your thing, then pull my string.” Loving to be alone in the desert, the Middle East is the perfect place for his comfort zone. I often think that the Devil is the great puppeteer who controls the emotions of the world. Emotionally, the Arabic culture is not what we would call tepid or lukewarm; rather it is a melodramatic and soap opera culture. These are, truly, the “Days of Our Lives” and “As the World Turns!”
Especially this seizure mentality of fire and ice goes on in the man and woman relations. Women are like super glue, everything sticks to them. They worry about making things right for everyone, getting everything done. Men don’t even know what has to be done. Even after telling them, they still don’t get it. Where is the T.V. and the remote and the chips? Right! The husband comes home and sees his wife rather tense and says, “Honey, how do you feel!” She retorts, “If you were more attentive, honey, you wouldn’t have to ask.” All these kind of relationships are on again and off again. It’s not only women who have change of life mood swings. All you have to do is look at us old guys trying to work out at the gym. You’ll have plenty of material to back up what I am saying. By the way, did you ever wonder why it takes girls longer to do things, they use every opportunity as a get together even in front of the leg extension machine!
But it is very difficult to regulate our emotions and control our anger. It comes out somehow. Dale Bumper’s, the former Senator from Arkansas, told the story of a preacher who challenged his congregation with the question: “Is there anyone who is perfect, except Jesus?” A gentleman in the back pew raised his hand and said, “Well, I never met him personally, but my wife said her first husband was.” That’s the way it goes I guess.
In the other Synoptic Gospels it says that this epileptic would throw himself on the ground and froth and foam at the mouth and be generally unruly. Sometimes in our anger we froth and foam and spew out wrathful words. The former Attorney General John Ashcroft gave a wonderful speech to his staff at his retirement dinner which was carried on C-Span. He talked about the delicacy of human intimacy and how important it is to care for the people you encounter at work and at home. He said his mother always kept a saying on the refrigerator with one of those little magnets. It read: “Talk is cheap, but you can never buy it back again.” Isn’t that true.
This boy’s illness represents our own spiritual illness, an illness only the Lord and the Holy Spirit can cure. And Jesus said it can only be cured with prayer and fasting. Without prayer and fasting we will never regulate our soul or stabilize our mind or clarify our desires or purify our actions.
That is why Jesus says you have to develop the faith of a mustard seed, a very small seed. Faith is grown in the heart, like seeds are grown in the soil. Faith needs the rain of prayer and the fertilizer of fasting in order to mature and bear fruit. Maybe we can go to Kroger’s produce department and buy granny smith apples, but they don’t grow like that, there is a tree somewhere in Australia where they came from. We need the nourishment of prayer and the pruning of fasting to become strong to bear the fruitfulness of the virtues, and especially to meet the sudden challenges in our lives with peace and serenity.
And we know these challenges come to us. Normally, we are always like the boy, being thrown into the fire of anger and then into the frozen chill of depression. We battle these spiritual conditions with drugs; but sometimes Zoloft can’t get us off the rollercoaster of our reactions to change.
I found that out about myself. We never pray harder or more deeply, intensely, or sincerely than when someone we love is in real danger. Then we are in danger of being abandoned in the world. The cutting wind of earthly loneliness whips through the outer shell of our security coats and we are at the mercy of the elements that treat us like the bending trees in the forest when a storm moves through. We sense that one of the very few people in this life who care for us as we are more than for the way we present ourselves to the world will be gone. And the telephone number will not be matched to those essential names wherein we receive our names and our identities. We move from the warmth of the fire of abiding love to the raw cold of vulnerability. Whenever I hear of “code blue” in room 214 that cold crystallizes my veins and arteries and I can’t move. I know prayer and fasting have to kick in then, have to bring us to the familiarity of being with God, or else we are not going to make it. Faith has to cover us in the blanket of the certainty that God will care for us.
I remember my friend Florence telling me about her husband Augustus. Growing up he was really poor. When he finally got that good job and was able to buy the wardrobe he always wanted he stood in front of his closet and stared and wondered at what a change had come to him. He meticulously arranged his shoes and clothes according to a strict color scheme where each shade of one color was succeeded by the next group of colors. When he retired, Florence was still working at her business. So he volunteered to do the housework. Florence was Gus’s opposite. She was an artist and a business woman, which, perhaps, is rare. In Bohemian style, she was not as precise as Gus in the way she took care of her things. Everything was clean and cared for but there was no hint of a compulsion for orderliness.
Augustus loved her for this. His upbringing had stolen his childhood from him, he would never feel the elation of being spontaneous, of not having to worry about things or about who in the world loved him. He was always thinking that his good fortune was a dream and that he would awaken to some hammer blow of change that would keep him down again. So he battled sadness. He would go into that silent place where all the doors to his heart were shut, where all the windows of his soul were hidden by the curtains of disappointment, by the shadows of bad memories. When he emerged from those thoughts Florence was there with a smile and an embrace, and the cold soul would melt in the love of her love.
After Gus had fallen asleep in the Lord, she happened to notice something that had escaped her attention previously. When she went to get a class from the kitchen cabinet all the glasses were perfectly spaced between each other, perfectly symmetrical. Florence laughed a little, then tears came to her eyes. She had just put the glasses in the cabinet, clean but not sorted. All those years she had done that. When Gus started doing the housework he put his own stamp on the work. She never heard him complain that things were not ordered the way he wanted. Then she went to the pantry and found all the canned vegetables arranged in rows like a garden row: beans with beans; peas with peas; corn with corn, etc. She realized that he loved her more than his eccentricities. It was a good thing that all these years she had been a woman of prayer. The balance that prayer and fasting had brought to her soul kept her on her feet. At that moment of tender reflection nothing else could have.