Blessed Exhaustion

A Homily for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

I’m exhausted! How’s that for an inspirational way to begin a homily? But it’s true: I’m exhausted! Some of you may know I am the novice director of our Holy Cross Novitiate just down the street from here. Last Saturday we had our most recent class of novices complete their program and make their 1st Profession of Vows. And now I’m exhausted, but it’s not just the exhaustion of spent energy after an intense year of religious formation, it is also a Blessed Exhaustion, because I am not just exhausted due to what I’ve done. I am also exhausted with who I am… and that is where the blessing comes in!

Elijah is exhausted! After slaughtering the prophets of Baal, he is on the run from King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, the latter having promised to “do to him what he did to her prophets!” But Elijah’s physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion is only an entree to a deeper exhaustion. He’s tired of himself! Elijah says: “This is enough Lord! Take my life for I am no better than my ancestors.” But listen to that prayer. Is it a prayer for death or a prayer for life? Or better said, a prayer that seeks the kind of necessary death that leads to life?

Elijah is worn out by a life of struggling and trying to make his way through the wreckage of the years. You live long enough and any of us can look back and see what I like to call: “The wreckage of this little life of mine!” But the wreckage is directly linked to the “mine-ness.” The illusion that this life is mine. Elijah prays: “This is enough Lord! Take MY life. And give me rather THE life you wish for me!” That kind of exhaustion is not an easy place to be for any of us. It can lead to resignation, depression, indifference and the temptation to just give up. That’s why the angel says to Elijah: “Get up and eat! Or else the journey will be too long for you.”

Elijah in the desert, under the broom tree, faces himself directly and realizes he’s simply tired of what he sees. He’s tired of living “his” life. A life full of compulsion, contrivance, and complicity. Always struggling under the compulsion to try to be someone he is not. Always plying the necessary contrivances to keep up the charade. And always finding himself complicit with a world that doesn’t want him to be who God created him to be, but rather to be a self-made man living life by his own self-made plan. In the wilderness Elijah turns and faces the truth, feels the full weight of his exhaustion and prays: “This is enough, Lord! Take my life for I am no better than my ancestors!” Yes, Elijah is praying for death, but it’s the kind of necessary death that is simply a prelude to the new life God desires for him.

Like us, like the crowd in the gospel who have learned to live a life addicted to manna, Elijah realizes at some point we have to surrender totally to the Bread of Life, the bread that doesn’t just get us by day-to-day, the bread that doesn’t need to be collected every morning and labored over to make something of it, but the Bread freely given to each of us daily and not just a Bread for this life, but the Bread that promises Eternal Life which always begins right here and right now.

At some point we all have to take the risk that Elijah took: to turn and face directly our own Blessed Exhaustion and to finally surrender MY life for THE Life that only God can give me. It may be a tenuous place to find ourselves, but in the end, when we surrender our own addiction to the manna that simply gets us by day-to-day, it is a liberation. It is an unburdening of the many burdens we’ve placed on our own shoulders; burdens God never gave us to carry, but rather burdens we’ve insisted on carrying as we’ve continue to repeat the cycle of compulsion, contrivance, and complicity.

I imagine we are all here today because somewhere in our own hearts we seek to respond to the angel’s instruction to Elijah: “Get up and eat! Or else the journey will be too long for you.” Get up and eat the Bread of Life, freely given for the life of the world; an Eternal Life that is already ours in Christ. When we know that, when we trust that, the journey can never be too long because it’s a journey that never ends. It becomes a journey less marked by exhaustion and more marked by the kind of freedom, hope, and joy for which our world is longing.

By taking the risk of facing our own Blessed Exhaustion we become people who wake up the world as we pray: “This is enough Lord! Take MY life and give me THE life that is your eternal gift.” And then we become bread of life for a world full of people who are always hungering for something more than what they’ve settled for.