Musings on Being Duped
[“You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped. You were too strong for me, and You triumphed. . . . If I say, ‘I will not mention God, nor speak any more in God’s name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I simply cannot endure it” (Jer 20:7-9).]
O Ambusher,
This last week began with the first routine football Sunday in the Basilica of Your Sacred Heart since before the pandemic. On that brilliant September morn the place once again was swollen with those opting to experience a fifth quarter. The seats all being filled early on, those standing congested the narthex, the transepts, the aisles, the wall spaces, and finally the alter area. As the processional was about to begin this casually-clad multitude, each of us a hybrid melding some ratio of the devout and the pagan, quieted yet more, seemingly mute and breathless on the threshold in a way which still amazes this convert after 32 years.
A student proclaimed the first reading from the book of Jeremiah. By the time he finished opening for us this prophet’s ambush at Your hands I found myself being segued into mystery and worship. This dislocation continued as the cantors led us in my psalm of choice (63), the antiphon being “My soul is thirsting for You, O Lord, thirsting for You my God.” It was amazing: a thousand of us, give or take, many looking like we had just stumbled out of Section F, repeatedly singing together, both powerfully and reverentially, “My soul is thirsting for You.” You! Sometimes liturgy can be soaring and transporting drama!
So then, what was going on? As starters, aspects of my serpentine journey to You were being uncannily imaged by the “weeping prophet.” I was skewered by the word “dupe,” its tawdry etymology notwithstanding, which managed to get into the liturgy’s translation. Understanding the word as an amalgam of “ambush” and “seduction,” I recapitulated the surprise, the shock, the seeming deception, of Your too-good-to-be-true and unconditional Love, one cutting across, inverting, and overthrowing all of my paradigms. Yes, I have been had, and I have let myself be had. I, alas, an agentive dupee.
And then the prophet was unscrolling my decades-long struggle to trust Your unconditional Love as proclaimed, embodied, and given imprimatur in Your Christ. Jeremiah’s images for my turmoil in the face of Your tenacious pursuit, Your relentless stalking, were my own: I too cried out, “I will simply forget You! Henceforth I will not speak of You!” But, alas, I underestimated You; I did not anticipate the sheer heat of Your fire within my emptiness; I could not have known that I was in over my head and simply could not ignore The One filling the entire room, to say nothing of heaven and earth. I repeatedly self-distracted, meandering here and there, hoping to assuage the searing coals. But You were indefatigable, merciless, brutal, assaulting my celebrated agency, depleting my resistance, by all previous measures “ruining me for life.” In the end You exhausted me, driving me to ground, O Hound, and I capitulated. Yes, even the suspect verb “dupe” is too lame, too tame, for such an ambush.
Back to the Mass, the Psalter had all of us intoning “My soul is thirsting for You,” each somewhere on a continuum of knowing and not knowing that of which we sang. And amid the repetition of that antiphon I intuited yet again that all of us, having been sourced in You, were being drawn back (redítus) via sundry paths to You, The One for whom we thirst “in a dry and weary land without water” (Ps 63:1). Indeed, I was musing with Saint Paul whether all gifted with being in that moment were not groaning in anticipation of inclusion in a cosmic homecoming beyond what tongue can tell (Rom 8:19-22).
I experienced both readings, Jeremiah and the Psalter, as about my trek into greater awareness of You, O Lover. I continue to seek to wager all on You as Self-disclosed in Your Christ. Sunday last, in the improbable context of a football Sunday liturgy, that commitment was deepened.
