Dai­ly Reflec­tion
Decem­ber 1, 2005

Some­times our col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence of a cur­rent event enables us to hear a text of Scrip­ture with a fresh vivid­ness. Notice how the expe­ri­ence of Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na helps us hear afresh today’s Gospel read­ing, the final words of Jesus’ Ser­mon on the Mount:

Every one who lis­tens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like the wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buf­fet­ed the house. But it did not col­lapse; it had been set solid­ly on rock. And every­one who lis­tens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buf­fet­ed the house. And it col­lapsed and was com­plete­ly ruined. Matthew 7:24-27.

Some of the engi­neers who exam­ined the breached lev­ees in New Orleans found that some of those struc­tures were indeed built on sand and were breached not because of the force of the surge but because of the poor foun­da­tion. Well, any­way, reports like this and the pho­to and video imagery that accom­pa­nied them, help us feel anew the pow­er of Jesus’ images.

The choice of a house has arche­typ­al pow­er. Peo­ple who write about the sig­nif­i­cance of dreams say that in a dream a house rep­re­sents your life; and the qual­i­ty of that house — ordered, say, or chaot­ic, dark, well-light­ed, messy, dec­o­rat­ed — rep­re­sents the qual­i­ty of your life. It is clear that the hous­es (built on sand or built on rock) rep­re­sent the pos­si­bil­i­ties on one’s life. Egypt­ian pharaohs, with no oth­er foun­da­tion avail­able but sand (!), built the most sol­id struc­tures they could, those impres­sive pyramids.

Jesus, of course, was not rec­om­mend­ing pyra­mids. What does Jesus say makes the dif­fer­ence between a life head­ed for dis­as­ter and a life that is sol­id? Doing the will of God, accord­ing to what he has just laid out in the Ser­mon on the Mount: curb­ing your anger, rec­on­cil­ing, curb­ing your lust, being faith­ful in mar­riage, speak­ing with straight­for­ward hon­esty, respond­ing to hos­til­i­ty with non­vi­o­lence, even lov­ing the enemy—in all things doing to oth­ers what we would have them do to us. Any­thing else, he says, is like build­ing a house on sand. And what does it take to live like that? It takes a village—well, at least it takes a com­mu­ni­ty of faith, who know that they need a pow­er greater than them­selves to do it. That’s why Matthew put the Lord’s Prayer smack in the mid­dle of the Ser­mon on the Mount.

Those British Jesuits saints we cel­e­brate today, Edmund Cam­pi­on and Robert South­well, could have built stun­ning careers had they con­formed to the Eliz­a­bethan heresy. Cam­pi­on could have built a life of high polit­i­cal hon­or and South­well might have built a lit­er­ary life that rivaled Shakespeare’s (even what lit­tle he wrote prompt­ed the Bard’s imi­ta­tion). Decid­ing that such careers would have been build­ing on sand, they chose to risk all for ser­vice of Jesus accord­ing to the lights of the con­sciences, and wound up hung, drawn and quartered—and now hailed as saints of the Church.

These exam­ples can help us think about what we are try­ing to build with our lives, and on what kind of foundation.