(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Mass-Blog-for-the-5th-Sunday-of-Ordinary-Time-2025.mp3)
Most Godly people are acquainted with shame. Saints and prophets often grow from that fertile dirt. The readings for the fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time document it:
“Woe is me, I am doomed,” says Isaiah, “for I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.” (Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8)
“I am the least of the apostles,” says St. Paul, “not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” (1 Corinthians 15:1-11)
“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man,” says St. Peter to Jesus. (Luke 5:1-11)
Nevertheless, Peter and Paul ended up offering the same prayer to God that Isaiah did: “Send me!”
While shame is a close acquaintance of all souls, we deny knowing him—just as Peter denied knowing Jesus during his Master’s time of need. While humanity will forever remember Peter for that denial, we like to believe our own big hustle that we have little to confess.
“The Big Hustle” is also the title of a book written by fellow sinner Jim Wahlberg, brother of the more famous Wahlbergs, Mark and Donnie. The book is a record of Jim’s growing up with Shame as he followed this acquaintance into jail cell after jail cell. Or did Shame follow him?
Jim tells us he was raised a Catholic in name only, and when he did show up for Mass as a kid, he’d grab a bulletin to prove he’d been there, then dart out to watch a ballgame. When he did sit through an entire liturgy, he got the feeling fellow congregants were judging him. He lived in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other—and their sins. Jim’s led him to prison several times.
His Big Hustle was creating the illusion he was trying to change. It took a saint to turn his illusion into reality. St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta accepted an invitation to visit the prison in which Wahlberg happened to be staying at one point. She prayed with him and his fellow prisoners—rapists, murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers “and just general scumbags like me,” he recounts.
“For the first time in my life, I saw the face of Christ,” he continues. “The face of love.”
When asked by the press why she visited such places, Mother Teresa responded simply, “You must find the face of God on the faces of these prisoners.”
Shame and humility are not the same, but humility can grow out of shame’s dirt—as all saints learn. Saints in the making recognize they may stay a little dirty as they try to grow. But as Wahlberg acknowledges, that’s why God puts other saintly sinners in our lives—to baptize us with love-infused water. A gathering of such souls is called a Church. Even the humblest souls in it are worthy to go out in the world with Isaiah’s prayer on their lips: “Send Me!”
–Tom Andel
We all have some aspect of shame in our lives. Perhaps it was when we were kids and made fun of others in a shameful attempt to make us feel bigger than we are. Maybe even now we try to prop up our low self esteem or the sad state of our ego. Sadly, this can often be at the expense of someone else. How sad.
The readings for this Sunday do offer us the insight into who God wants us to be, instead of how we want to be perceived.
There’s no better anesthesia for shame than mob mentality. In fact, joining a mob often helps each of us disguise our sin as virtue. The Pharisees did their worst damage as a mob. But when they were about to stone a “harlot,” Jesus overpowered their mob anesthesia by reviving the chronic pain of personal guilt. One by one, that debilitating pain made each of them too weak to throw a stone at anyone but themselves. The only lasting relief for such pain, as St. Mother Theresa taught, is to find God’s expression in the faces of others–AND the one that looks back at us from the mirror.