Weekly HOMILY for March 11, 2007: Reform Your Lives: A Lesson Taught Through Sculpture

3rd Sunday of Lent, Cycle C
Our Lady of Grace
March 11, 2007

Reform Your Lives: A Lesson Taught Through Sculpture
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


Bent Torso

This past summer I spent several days visiting with friends in Roanoke, Virginia and one of the mornings we went to a lecture at the local art museum.

The speaker was a sculptor named Betty Branch who was discussing the motivation and artistic urge that gave life to her art form. That is, what inside her gave life and vibrancy to her creation of art?

I would invite you to create in your mind a fascinating piece of sculpture entitled “Bent Torso.” It is the life-size bronze torso of a woman, bent back and to one side at the waist, the back, neck, and head are not portrayed, nor are the arms or legs. So it’s just a torso.

What you have then is a beautifully formed figure up to the shoulders where it ends in a rather jagged and irregular way.

Betty’s eyes gleam as she explains that the sculpture portrays the human in each one of us and does so in a very dynamic way. As human beings you and I are at one and the same time: whole and fragmented, complete and incomplete, at peace and in tension.

Her passion as an artist is to bring that message to others as they look at the work called “Bent Torso.”

There I sat in the museum thinking to myself, “This would make a great homily someday,” and here we are!


The Parable of the Fig Tree

The parable of the fig tree in today’s Gospel is Jesus’ great assurance that the God of mercy and compassion is in our very midst, that God’s love, which knows neither limit nor condition, is ours in every moment we live.

Like the merciful and generous gardener, God continues to see our worth and calls forth that goodness within each of us.

The fig tree is an invitation to hope in the unlimited love of our God. Thomas Merton once wrote: “We think our life is important to ourselves alone and do not know that our life is more important to the Living God than it is to our selves.”

No matter what the condition of our “Bent Torso” – that is, where we are in the continuum of fragmented-to-whole, incomplete-to-complete, or tension-to-peace – there is hope for us with God’s grace.

But it is important to know precisely what keeps us fragmented, incomplete or tense as a first step to the reform, which Jesus calls us to.

I’d like to suggest two areas to consider. The first is our attitude; the second is our particular weakness or sin.


Sinful Attitudes

There is such a thing as a sinful attitude – a way of looking at things that is a breeding ground for sinful choices and sinful actions.

These attitudes are acquired in places where we spend time; they are acquired – passed on to us like the flu – from people with whom we spend time.

So for example, we may acquire an attitude of racial or ethnic prejudice just from the people we call our friends or acquaintances, people who live and breathe an air of joking about others or making disparaging remarks.

Or we may acquire an irresponsible attitude toward sex outside of marriage because sexuality was never discussed at home or we’ve never learned how to be intimate without necessarily having sex.

Such attitudes create a climate within us of fragmentation, incompletion, and tension because they are so out of sync with our being created in God’s image.

I should quickly add that the sin in this area is not so much in the racial prejudice or our feelings about sex, but in our awareness of the roots of our difficulty and not being willing to re-form or re-shape that part of us.

We need to take responsibility to root out the weeds someone else may well have planted within us; that’s the call of Jesus for re-form today.


Sinful Acts

The second type of sinfulness that contributes to our fragmentation, incompletion, and tension is behavior, those actions voluntarily, that knowingly hurt or diminish ourselves and others.

So for example, one day I may decide to go full-throttle into profit-making where I make a buck at the expense of others or cheat on tax returns or on an exam in school.

Or perhaps I become so absorbed in my job or activities outside the family, as a way of escaping responsibilities as a parent or working on my marriage.

Just as attitudes hurt the human personality, so too can our voluntary actions. The sinfulness here is not so much changing an attitude, but looking at the behavior itself and choosing to sin no more.


Conclusion

How then does the piece of sculpture called “Bent Torso” help us in the reform of attitudes and behavior that Jesus calls us to today?

It assists us by dramatically showing us the good and bad, the whole and fragmented, the complete and incomplete, what’s at peace and what’s in tension within us all.

It also helps us not confuse the two, which is what we often do, pursuing the bad as if it were good.

Once the two are differentiated, what is good, whole, complete and peaceful in us motivates us, and what is bad, fragmented, incomplete and tension-filled becomes our goal for reform.

God speaks to us in so many ways; we give thanks for his voice in sculpture, as we respond to re-form this Lenten Season.