Noticing Hope Amid the Terror

Today’s reflection is by Bondings 2.0 contributor Michaelangelo Allocca.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time are available here.

Today we travel to other worlds. First, a little simple time travel: when I looked at the readings for this Sunday, I was hurled back exactly three years, to my blog post on the same readings in 2022. I resisted the temptation to reread that reflection: this was easier than I expected, even though “I can resist anything except temptation,” as Oscar Wilde said. The same scriptures spoke to me of very different things this time.

Such as other worlds. The writer L.P. Hartley famously said: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” In the ‘foreign country’ that produced today’s liturgical texts – both the first-century world of Jesus and Paul, and that of the psalmist and the prophet Malachi, centuries earlier – they do things quite differently, indeed. Two examples: they notice things, and they praise God through suffering and oppression. The second of these is also something we queer folk are rightly known for.

Among my circle of friends, colleagues, and students, I have become known for preaching the “spirituality of noticing stuff.” St. Ignatius of Loyola urges us to “seek God in all things,” and my Jesuit high school, like many others, drums this into our students constantly. But you can’t seek God in things unless you notice things, first. 

For instance, had I not lifted my head up from my phone as I walked to the subway, I would not have noticed the hawk catching a pigeon in midair right above my head in urban Brooklyn not long ago. Today’s readings give voice to a world where people noticed stuff – the natural world, as well as human actions and emotions – a lot better than most of us do.

Malachi’s words demonstrate that what our spiritual ancestors  noticed was literally earthier than ours: he says that the “proud and all evildoers will be stubble… set … on fire.” The odds are greater than 49 to 1 (I looked it up: fewer than 2% of US residents live or work on farms) that you have no first-hand visual reference for this, and you might only think of  whiskers when you read  “stubble.” But Malachi safely assumed that his audience knew exactly what it looked like. The simile was so common that we heard it just two weeks ago, when the book of Wisdom (3:7) said that God’s beloved “shall shine, and dart about like sparks through stubble.” The same fire which burns away evildoers is, for those who fear God, the “sun of justice with its healing rays.”

Our psalm shows the same intimate attention to details of God’s creation, vivified by startling imagination. It starts simply, telling us to sing praise with various instruments, then invites other parts of creation – first “the sea and what fills it,” and “the world and those who dwell in it” – to “resound” with us humans. While “resound” just means  “make noise,” delightful detail pours in next, when the rivers are asked to “clap their hands,” and the mountains “shout … for joy.” Did you even know that rivers have hands, and that mountains have mouths and vocal cords, not to mention emotions? Our Hebrew ancestors knew it, and sang that God would come to “rule the world with justice, and the peoples with equity.” They lived what Paul Claudel said: “God did not come to do away with suffering; he did not even come to explain it. He came to fill it with his presence.”

Ring a bell? We in the LGBTQ+ community are known for the same strange duplex of being oppressed, and producing beauty. Even if you look at the professions long stereotyped (yes, stereotypes are bad, but they can be instructive) as “gay,” they typically involve making people and places more gorgeous: hairdresser, makeup artist, interior decorator, dancer or choreographer … choir director. This last example is the most exquisitely ironic, since choir directors are often cherished for the beauty they bring to churches that won’t allow them to speak or live their true identity openly.

St.Paul, too, shows his knack for noticing things, but in his case, it’s mostly the vast superiority of his own behavior to that of his Thessalonian audience. He reminds them that while among them, he worked “in toil and drudgery, night and day,” rather than expecting charity. Then he adds, “Not that we do not have the right,” with breathtaking honesty and chutzpah, bordering on passive-aggression. I love how real Paul sounds, letting us notice even his mood as he writes. He adds that he hears that some are “not keeping busy but minding the business of others.” His tone sounds exactly like people in Alabama whom I used to hear saying (yes, even to me, sometimes), “You need to git some bidness of your own, an’ mind it.”

Finally, the gospel passage displays the same advanced skill in noticing stuff. It opens with people talking about the Temple, not simply saying that it’s beautiful, but going into specifics about its adornment with “costly stones and votive offerings.” Jesus kills the mood by prophesying that soon not one of these beautifully decorated stones would be left on top of each other. Historians confirm that this is exactly the destruction the Romans later wrought upon Jerusalem and especially the Temple – a model followed by Hitler when he told the Wehrmacht to treat Warsaw the same way.

In today’s gospel Jesus continues his torrent of terrifying promises that we hear from him in the lectionary readings at this time of year, but like the prophets and psalmist, He gives reason for hope amid the terror. He tells his hearers, when arrested and interrogated, “not to prepare your defense beforehand, for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.” Let us pray that, if we notice as skillfully as our spiritual forebears did, we can live as they did, in confidence that no adversary can overcome the God ever-present in both our joy and our suffering.

Michaelangelo Allocca, November 16, 2025