Readings for 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 2 KGS 5: 14-17; PS 98: 1-4; 2TM 2"8-13; LK 17: 11-19. http://usccb.org/bible/readings/101313.cfm
My wife and I have been in India now for six weeks. Peggy's working as a Fulbright researcher at the University of Mysore here in the country's south. I'm here . . . I'm only now realizing why.
To tell the truth, I had come to India more or less reluctantly. I mean since retirement I had traveled a great deal including six months in Costa Rica, five months in South Africa, and now the prospect of a full semester here in India. So perhaps understandably, I was feeling tired of living out of a suitcase.
I wondered then, why Life, why life's circumstances had brought me here to what many consider the "Soul of the World" -- an ancient culture with deep, deep spiritual roots
I thought about that for a long time. Then I concluded that the opportunity here is absolutely golden for spiritual growth.
That's why I'm here then, I concluded. Life is telling me I need to grow and break away from patterns of living and thought that have unconsciously become too comfortable and stifling.
And what resources there are in India for assisting in that project! There are spiritual masters here, teachers of meditation and yoga. (For example, Sunday I have an appointment with a Past Life Review teacher.)
In addition, Indian food (not my favorite) challenges me to adjust my palate. Cows walk the streets. Dress is different as well. Music too seems completely foreign (but delightful), as Peggy and I have discovered in attending a kind of "Indian Woodstock" festival of traditional chanting, drumming, flute and violin playing during the two-week festival of the god Ganesh. And the traffic. . . . I've never seen anything as wild. No rules at all that I can see. I doubt if I could learn to drive here.
All of this is forcing me to expand my horizons and break away from what spiritual masters here call "samskaras" -- habitual patterns of perceiving, thinking and living.
That's what spiritual masters do for a living -- they challenge old ways of thinking. It's what the prophet Elisha did in this morning's first reading, and what Jesus does in today's gospel selection. Both readings reveal God's love for those our cultural norms classify as strange and even evil.
Our first reading centralizes the prophet, Elisha, who worked in Samaria for 60 years in the 9th century BCE. That, of course, was a full 100 years or more before Samaritans emerged as Israel's bà ªte noir.
Nonetheless, it is true that Naaman may have been even more detestable to Elisha's contemporaries than Samaritans eventually became to the Jews. That's because Naaman was a captain in the army of the King of Aram who at the very time of the officer's cure was attacking Elisha's homeland. Elisha's cure of Naaman would be like extending free healthcare to a known al-Qaeda "terrorist" today.
In other words, Naaman is a foreigner and an enemy of Elisha's people. On top of that he's a leper, which supposedly further marks him as an object of God's disfavor. Despite all these disqualifications, the greatest prophet in Israel cures him.
The narrative's point: there is indeed only one God, and that God loves everyone, even our designated enemies. That was a stretch for the people of Elisha's time. It's a stretch for us.
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