Reflection for the 25th Sunday (Ordinary Time) September 2024

Richard Gaillardetz was a respected professor of theology at Boston College. In February 2022, Gaillardetz was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Ever the teacher and writer, he chronicled the fears and doubts, the joys and sufferings, the graces and blessings he experienced in the final season of his life. The essays were published in a remarkable book titled While I Breathe, I Hope.

Gaillardetz writes of a trip to visit family in Texas. He had no choice but to be transported by wheelchair to the gate. As he was being wheeled through the terminal, he passed a window in which he saw an image of “a somewhat feeble and emaciated old man, an image I struggled to recognize as my own.”

Gaillardetz writes that this new vision of himself led him to pray for what he called “the grace of diminishment”: “the grace to accept these new burdens and limitations,” to deal with his illness with “graced vulnerability,” to resist being “preoccupied with the ‘unfairness’ of my situation.”

Accepting such “diminishment,” Gaillardetz writes, meant “accepting the care and concern of others” as the presence of God in his life. Accepting his humble “diminishment” opened Gaillardetz to a new awareness of the sacred in his life.

“One of the unexpected graces of diminishment appears when I am drawn kicking and screaming out of my natural egotism to discover within a much-neglected reservoir of compassion for the suffering of others. This compassion, in turn, has redirected my prayer life quite concretely. While my flagging energy and unsteady balance preclude racquetball and golf, it has made me more available for prayer, and particularly for petitionary prayer. I have found a surprising and entirely unanticipated satisfaction in leisurely calling to mind before God my loved ones and those who have asked for my prayers.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls us to embrace the “grace of diminishment” that Richard Gaillardetz discovers in the course of his illness: to recognize our own vulnerability before our loving God and to respond with gratitude for the life God has breathed into us by sharing the blessings of this life with others — and in doing so, discovering the joy of realizing a new meaning and fulfilling purpose to our lives, no matter the challenges and circumstances we face. In seeking the greatness of being last, the authority of being the servant to others, the power of advocating for justice for the poor and victimized, we learn compassion; it is how we become responsible adults and contributing members of society; it is how we find meaning and purpose in our lives.

May we seek the grace of “diminishment”: not that we are of lesser value than we think but that our dignity is centered in being created in the love of God and that our life’s meaning is found in being the means for that love to transform our world.