I Told Her the Angel Might Fly

Many years ago, I was given this gift of a clay garden angel. I didn’t like it at all. It seemed like a squatty, ugly little thing, and I wanted to get rid of it, but I was concerned that Cynthia would protest. So I mentioned to my daughter that the angel might fly if someone were to go outside and throw it in the air. My daughter reported that it wasn’t working, and then I said that it probably only flies over concrete.

When my daughter came back inside in tears, I realized then that I had made a series of errors. And it all started with me refusing to accept the gift that I had been given. I did not look for what was good about the gift.

Lent is another gift that I had also refused to accept in my past. I think it is one of the best gifts we can choose to receive. It is a time of penance, a time when we distance ourselves from worldly things in order to more fully connect to things that are of God. The reason Lent is a gift is because it is one way to true freedom. Freedom from attachments to stuff is an amazingly wonderful place to be. You do not have to be standing in Lent for that to be true. The Church keeps giving the season. We get to receive it when it comes, and we can practice the same letting-go in ordinary weeks.

Now, God knows that I still have work to do, but I can tell I’m making progress. Recently, the business that I work for told those of us working in Boise that there is a long-term plan to cease operations. Some of us will be impacted within a couple of months, others of us will be impacted in a couple of years. But no matter what, my job is eventually going away. You know how much you’re attached when you lose it. This time, I was very much at peace. Twenty years ago, I was far from being at peace when I was in a business that shut down.

I attribute all of the difference to freedom. The freedom I have been given by practicing what the Church teaches in Lent and in the Triduum — those three days prior to Easter. Those seasons trained something in me that was not there twenty years earlier.

In John chapter 7, in the story of Jesus going into Jerusalem during the feast of Tabernacles, Jesus shows up in the middle of the week and he’s doing something that brings the Pharisees anger. Jesus is probably preaching that he can forgive, and that the way to God is through himself. It should be clear to the Pharisees that their jobs are going away.

The angry Pharisees are so attached to their role in the temple that they’re willing to kill to keep their jobs. This is the opposite of freedom. It is the opposite of detachment from worldly things. It would have been very shocking to a Pharisee to see their role challenged. To see someone with miraculous power supersede the entire Temple system. Change didn’t happen then like it does today. These Pharisees’ grandparents could have worked in the temple, and then their parents. There was no reason to think that change could even happen. It should have been a shocking and upsetting experience for these Pharisees.

For us, change happens. Are you aware that in several cities in the US, self-driving cars are roaming the streets? Big cities like Austin, Texas. These cars have no steering wheel, no brakes, no speedometer, no controls whatsoever. It’s a box on wheels carrying people around. Very soon, we’re going to see trucks driving themselves down the interstate. Can you imagine suddenly finding your plan of driving a truck suddenly dying because a machine starts doing your job instead of you?

How will these future unemployed truck drivers respond to this? The reaction will be mixed, as it was for the Pharisees. Some will want to kill these machines by pushing for laws banning their use. Others will not respond in anger, but with detachment. The difference is freedom — who is free from the attachment to worldly items. Who is free to move on to something else that machines can’t do right now.

The Catholic Church gives us the gift of a penitential season. If we accept that gift, if we choose to look at what is good about it, it becomes the gift of true freedom. You can receive that gift in Lent when it arrives. You can also practice the same detachment when a job, a plan, or a city is already leaving. Given a world where so many lives get disrupted, it is a highly relevant gift.

If you handed a child the thing you would not accept, start there. I wanted the ugly gift gone. I would not tell Cynthia. I used my daughter instead. She came back in tears. The first error was refusing the gift. The second was making her carry the refusal. Tell the truth about both. I did not want that angel. I should not have sent you outside with it. That is the sentence, if the child is still in the house to hear it.

If what is going away is a job, or a plan, or a life you built in a city that is closing, you already know how attached you are. Twenty years ago I was not at peace when a business shut down. This time I was. The difference was not that the loss was smaller. The difference was that I had practiced letting go before the notice arrived. You cannot talk yourself into that peace on the day the email comes. You practice it in smaller things — a season of not clinging, a gift you did not pick, a plan you do not get to keep.

You do not have to like the gift. You do have to stop throwing it. Look for one thing that is good in what you were given, or in what is ending, before you recruit someone smaller to make it disappear. Freedom, in this homily, is not getting to keep the job. It is not needing to kill the thing that is taking the job. That is a hard sentence. It is also the only way the next life after this one is not just another fight to keep what is already leaving.

This is a pastoral reflection, not clinical care and not a substitute for it. If you or someone you love is in immediate danger, call 988 or local emergency services.

Drawn from a homily first preached in 2017.