Outside In

My 10-year-old Hyundai was vandalized last weekend right outside the rectory: door lock popped-out; windows smashed; ignition ripped from the steering column. On a day when I had numerous sacramental and Mass responsibilities ahead of me, I was left stranded at the corner of Bow Street and Maryland Avenue in Elkton.

In those initial pre-dawn hours, I went through almost every range of emotion imaginable – shock, grief, fear, anger … you name it. I do remember praying at one point as I picked shards of greenish-blue glass out of the driveway: “God, why did you let this happen? You know that I needed a car today.” And then, in a moment of rage directed at the Lord, I added: “THIS is how you treat your priests, huh?”

Translated, what I was really implying was this: After all I do for You, this is how you repay me?”

I’m ashamed to admit that is where my head and heart went in that moment where crisis and prayer intersected. Saying it without saying it, I told God I deserved better for all that I was doing for His Church.

In that moment, I was the Pharisee who “went up to the Temple to pray.” Until that moment, I don’t know if I ever would have considered myself to be such a man.

Like most of us, I suspect, I always saw this Pharisee as a selfish braggart: “Look how great I am, Lord. And look how good I am as opposed to the others – the ones who never come to Temple; the ones who don’t want to follow your Law; the ones like that tax collector back there, the cheat and public scandal that he is.” We walk away clinging to the moral of the parable: Don’t pray like a Pharisee.

And while there may be truth in that statement, I think we would be missing something of great value here: the Pharisee really believed he was sincere in his prayers and public act of worship. He came to the Temple with his list of accomplishments, telling the Lord he fasts and tithes and avoids adulterous relationships. He did these acts of penance and kept such disciplines because in his heart of hearts, he believed he was serving the Lord.

The Pharisee believed he was showing God how much he loved Him. And here’s what we overlook: he actually did. Even in his bragging and his comparison, this religious leader thought he was putting God first and showing Him how much he loved Him and his faith. Many of us – myself included – come to God as the Pharisee did: “Look, Lord, how devoted I am…”

This sentiment is sincere. We come to Him as a child would his or her parents: Look at my A-plus; watch me hit this homerun; see how talented an artist I am, Mom?” We end up having to prove ourselves, as if our worthiness of another’s love is based on what we do to show it. “Dad will only really love me if I am good. Mom will love me when I make her happy …”

Where the Pharisee went wrong – and where many of us follow him – is that we bring the outside world into our inner-relationship with God the Father. In other words, as the world tells us we must prove our existence and our worth through what we do, so too do we bring that same attitude to prayer and our relationship with the Trinity. “God loves me because I go to daily Mass … because I went to Confession last week … ever since I started volunteering in the parish.”

But here’s the fullest truth: God loves you and me and the Pharisee even if we did none of these things. If you and I spent our entire lives from cradle to grave never acting charitably, never coming to worship and never giving Him a passing thought, we would still be loved beyond all measure.

Please meditate on this for the rest of the week – and for the rest of your life: I am loved simply because I am His. It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do. I am loved because He created me in love. Period. The end. I am loved by God.

When we know that, it changes everything. I mean really know it. When I live in and from that space of love, it transforms how I pray, how I see the world, how I reach out to others and how I spend my time.

It also shapes me to be more like the tax collector in the back of the Temple.

What touches my heart deeply about that moment is simply the authentic cry of the heart in that moment from one who has been touched so deeply by the Father’s Love that he couldn’t help but cry out: “Have mercy on me a sinner.” That’s not a cry of shame. It is a recognition that there are things in my life that I have willingly chosen that have crowded out that Love, and I want that Love back.

It’s the understanding that God’s Love is the only thing that fills the emptiness within me, and it gives me the desire to want to be better, to love more compassionately, to be less selfish, and to be His instrument in the world.

When one cries out humbly from the heart as the tax collector did at prayer that day in the Temple, one is transformed. Slowly, maybe. But the change does come. We become Christ’s Presence in the way we go about our daily lives, in the vocations we discern, and in times we spend in prayer and Adoration. The cry of mercy is one that heals us and moves us forward. It is pure strength that comes from His Love and grace.

Real courage and authentic living comes when we are most willing to turn our prayer and hearts toward a God who forgives and loves unconditionally as opposed to those times when we think God can only love us when we do great things. We do these things not because we have to prove anything; they are a natural result of mercy taking hold of our lives for good.

A few years back, I heard a story that I won’t soon forget, a modern-day Pharisee and tax collector tale: A woman who struggled all her life with obesity was standing at the front desk of Planet Fitness as a group of gym regulars walked past toward the machines. Without necessarily intending to be overheard, someone in the group said to her friends: “I should work out next to THAT chunky one – I’ll feel really good about myself then!”

The woman at the front desk overheard, of course, and what she longed to say -- what she really wanted the younger, fitter gym-goers to know – was this: that today was her first day. That it took every ounce of courage to walk in those front doors. That she had been abused so often as a child in a variety of ways that food was her only comfort. But she was determined by the grace of God to make a change for the better, to start anew. She almost walked out the door of Planet Fitness that morning after hearing the snide remark. But instead she stayed, and she asked silently for God’s courage and then for someone to show her how to use the machines. It was, in a sense, her “Lord, have mercy on me” moment.   

She knew her worth came not from snide worldly remarks and Pharisee-like judgment; it came from knowing who she was and Whose she was, and that she was loved simply because she was a daughter of the King. She stayed not to prove anything to those other women. She stayed because she knew she was worth fighting for … and dying for.

Through her faith, she found the courage to stay and fight – and to date, she’s already lost 35 lbs. “But even if I lost nothing,” she said, “I know that I am loved.”

Too often, we live our relationship with the Lord as a Pharisee: well-meaning, but too focused on proving we are lovable and worthy.



Live instead from a heart that simply knows it is in need of mercy and then loves one’s own self and others from that very space. After all, doing so can make saints out of tax collectors and Planet Fitness customers.