“Please let me, your servant, have two mule-loads of earth, for I will no longer offer holocaust or sacrifice to any other god except to the LORD.”

          Faith begins in wonder, because faith is nurtured by perseverance, perseverance is nurtured by gratitude, and gratitude begins in wonder. That’s where we ended last Sunday. Today, we see that gratitude leads to faith that saves, as our Lord commends the grateful leper. Gratitude turns out, once again, not just to be “squishy Catholicism,” but an essential part of living our faith.

          We also see another example of gratitude in the Old Testament leper healed by the prophet Elisha. This leper, though, has a name, because he is a big deal. Naaman is the general of the army of Syria, making him incredibly wealthy and powerful. Other clues from Second Kings suggest that he is not only a general, but a prime minister figure – second in power only to the King himself. Gratitude for his miraculous healing leads Naaman to a decisive change: He will no longer worship any god except the Lord. He is risking power and wealth to be faithful to the One he has recognized as the only God worthy of worship.

          Naaman makes a strange request. He asks for two mule-loads of dirt, seemingly as a necessary condition for fulfilling his vow only to worship the Lord God of Israel. Why does he need dirt? Naaman recognizes an important truth about the human person: We need roots. We need a sense of connectedness to a particular place. We derive a sense of identity from where we call home. When people introduce themselves, they usually start with where they’re from, because the place we call home forms the person we are.

          Naaman recognizes that right worship of God also needs to be rooted – connected to a place. To worship the God he encounters in Israel, he needs to take a piece of Israel back with him. It’s the same instinct that leads people to bring home souvenirs from the Holy Land with lockets of dirt, or to buy olive wood articles. Surely there are woods just as beautiful as the olive, but none of them have drunk from the soil upon which God Himself set foot in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. It’s the same instinct that lead St. Helena to bring back dirt from the Holy Land to scatter on the site upon which she built the Church of the Holy Cross in Rome to house the relics of Christ’s Passion she brought back, and for which that church is now called the Holy Cross “in Jerusalem.”

          We live in a world without roots, without grounding, where we easily move from place to place, and where all those places look incredibly alike. (Airbnbs and coffee shops in Mongolia, Kenya, and Peru are eerily similar – “From Beijing to Helsinki, quirkiness never looked more identical”.) So, it’s unsurprising that we live in a world that is also increasingly prosaic, and that lacks wonder. When everything is so familiar (Ikea furniture and industrial chic décor), there’s nothing to provoke wonder.

          To re-instill faith, we need gratitude. And for gratitude we need wonder. And for wonder, we need rootedness. We need beauty to wonder at, and for something to be beautiful, it needs to be wonderfully and completely what it itself is. It needs to be rooted in a tradition that it exemplifies in an outstanding way.

          You can recapture rootedness by investing deeply in where you are, by learning more about your local community, by committing to that place. There is an incredible beauty to raising children where you yourself grew up (or where your spouse grew up). Of course it’s not possible for everyone, but a next-best option might be raising children where other people are raising children where they themselves grew up, so they’re immersed in a community with deep roots and wide bonds (like, ahem, Our Lady of Good Hope Parish and Fort Wayne, Indiana).

          You can also re-capture a sense of rootedness with actual roots. Contact with the natural world, nurturing the growth of living plants, shows us that things flourish when they are treated according to their own natures. The tomato plant only thrives when it is treated precisely as a tomato plant. When we see the natural world thrive when its nature is respected, we respect our own inborn natures, growing and developing not primarily according to our own ideas of ourselves, but according to what we really are, to the way in which we’re rooted.

          We can also recapture wonder by rediscovering poetry. Poetry used to infuse our ways of speaking and writing. It is poetry that gives the memorable and soaring nature of the great speeches and documents that have defined our nation’s history – from Jefferson to Lincoln to Martin Luther King. Increasingly, we live in a prosaic world, exposed to enormous amounts of uninspiring text that is usually boring and at best can manage to entertain us. Prose rarely inspires, and it very rarely evokes wonder.

          Poetry is difficult, though, because of the rationalistic way in which we see the world. Rationalism, to which we all subscribe in part, teaches us that things only have value if we understand them, and prizes transparent meaning. Poetry has meaning too, but its meanings aren’t transparent. They’re translucent. They always remain somewhat beyond our understanding, until that moment when we sense that we’ve grasped it, but once you do, you’ve lost the ability to explain it.

          As Catholics, though, we encounter this poetic way of being in the Sacred Liturgy. In the Mass and the other rites of Holy Mother Church, God speaks to us in a poetic way, through symbols and mysteries that surpass human understanding. The Church takes as Her inspiration for sacred song the most poetic book of Scripture, the Psalms, the original Christian hymnal. She uses signs, symbols, gestures, and words whose meanings are not transparent, but translucent, like the veils on the ciborium containing the real but mysterious presence of Christ.

          If we expect the way we worship to “make sense” in the way that the prosaic world in which we live “makes sense,” we make a category error. We expect poetry to be comprehensible in the manner of prose, to have a clearly defined and easily discernible meaning. Much of how the Church prays in the Sacred Liturgy will only be comprehensible when we re-capture that intuitive sense of things, rooted in wonder rather than strict rationality, when we learn to look for the translucent mystery, rather than the transparent, immediately comprehensible meaning.

          While our world might be prosaic, there are great signs of hope. There are movements to recapture wonder and intuitiveness in education, such as the Catholic liberal arts and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd in our parish school and religious education. There are many young people, especially, in the Church, looking to recapture that sense of rootedness, that sense of wonder in which faith can thrive. This is what has led so many people, and especially younger people, to appreciate a sense of mystery in the way in which we celebrate our faith, to seek a greater sense of continuity with the way in which Christians have historically worshiped the one true God, to seek their own two mule-loads of earth.

          For some people, that desire might be disquieting, or even threatening. If you grow a tomato plant, though, it doesn’t mean that you’re never going to a supermarket ever again. And if we sing an antiphon in Latin, it doesn’t mean that the whole Mass is going to be in Latin again before you know it. Even though the way the liturgical changes happened in the 1960s and 70s didn’t make it clear, it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing affair. Gardens and supermarkets can coexist.

          Gratitude for what God has done for us springs from an appreciation of who we really are, who we have always been, and who we always will be. Rootedness in our communities, in our families, and especially in the way that we experience God in the celebration of the mysteries of our faith, is essential for cultivating the wonder in which gratitude and faith are born. Seek the poetic, seek the translucent, seek the wonder; seek it in the place in which you’ve been rooted, in the way in which your ancestors sought it, and you’ll find something for which to be grateful, something to lead you to God.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XXVIII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXV

A fascinating article on homogenous global design:

https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification