That 11th Commandment

 

Penecost was a feast celebrating the first cuttings of the grain harvest.  This feast of Weeks was Thanksgiving Day in those times, a feast uniting the community. It was in this setting that the big Novena began.     

 

Unity:  It was a challenge to everyone.  It was one area, the last area—on matters of sex—that a priest, a rabbi wanted to talk to people.  People did not seem to accept advice well on matters of intimacy in their lives.  Secular people responded the same way on the matter of abortion.  Government, church should butt out.  The holiest men of the Torah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all practiced polygamy. Holy men.  There has always been a struggle on men with sexual appetites.  But sex was the thing that united men and women.  And sex gives meaning and purpose to your authentic love. It took time to learn the lesson.  Some of us never did.

 

It was in union with God, with others, that we found love.  Amidst the struggle.  I felt needed amidst what I felt to be a new poverty in 2008 by paying for college for a girl in the Phillipines.   The readings this Sunday were all about unity.  There was reference to Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia. Whereas the Torah had discussed the loss of mortar at the Tower of Babel, for the first time in the name of God people were united again.  Inhabitants of Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, all were once again in search but a search together. And somehow all of this was going to be tied to that 11^th Commandment, the last one heard.  “Hey!  Hey you!  Go baptize all nations.  In the name of the Father.  And of the Son. And of the Holy Ghost. Why are you standing and looking at the sky?  Go! Yes, you.  Now!”